Talk:Peak oil

Notable discussions from archive

Endless oil?

What about Jack?

According to BP in 2006 the world consumed 83.7 million barrels per day. 15 billion divided by 83.7 million is about 180, so Jack is a 6 month supply for the world, assuming no increase in consumption.

What about all the past predictions that were wrong (see Peak oil#Historical understanding of world oil supply limits)?

That's a rhetorical argument. The basic theory has proved accurate for modeling the extraction history of mineral resources in specific regions. Also, virtually every type of scientific prediction has improved since the year 1860. Scientists use the scientific method, which involves learning from their mistakes. The more times scientists predicted incorrectly in the past, the more likely they are to predict correctly in the future. A similar logic applies to Aviation safety - because the NTSB and other regulatory agencies analyze each crash to find the cause, each accident leads to changes which make aviation safer going forward. Pointing to all the air crashes in the 1930s is not an accurate way to evaluate today's aviation safety. Also see List of past presumed highest mountains - geographers have been wrong several times about which mountain on Earth is highest, but each new candidate for highest peak had an increasing probability of being correct. Today there is only a negligible chance that a higher mountain than Mount Everest exists on Earth, undiscovered. Past errors about which mountain was highest are irrelevant to whether Mount Everest is, in fact, the highest mountain - one could not argue against Mount Everest's status simply by pointing to the past errors, because geographers of today know so much more than geographers in the past.

ABC's 20/20 report from 2006 says we have endless oil[1].

That's a video about tar sands. It says we're running out of cheap, clean oil, and that if we include tar sands we have 100 years left. Their expert also said $500/bbl oil isn't out of the question.

The IEA's Oil Market Report shows that global oil production has increased x% in the last x months, and shows no sign of slowing down.

They conflate the concept of "production" with "supply". They never mention what total production is, so one has to do some foot work to put the numbers together. To them, supply "Comprises crude oil, condensates, NGLs, oil from non-conventional sources and other sources of supply", and including gain in refinery capacity (processing stored oil). In other places, they actually include ethanol and other biofuels in supply!

Nine barrels being used, one barrel being found?

Is this true?

Yes. Actually about 7.6. Today we consume 30 billion barrels per year and the discovery rate is approaching 4 billion barrels of crude oil per year:The oil supply tsunami alert. This is crude oil though; quantifying unconventional discoveries is problematic.

Why is James Howard Kunstler here?

Because he examines oil from the demand side, rather than the supply side which most economists and oil men consider. This is important.

Why is called "Peak oil" instead of "Oil peak"?

See the archive for this long discussion.

References

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External links

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Abiotic oil

This article is not for discussing the merits of the Abiogenic petroleum origin hypothesis. It gets a fair mention in the appropriate section and does not need to be expanded.

Well done for balance

When I turned to this article, I expected to see something like Intelligent Design, where only the Scientific Consensus was presented and everyone else was WP:FRINGE. Instead I saw a balanced article ("Optimistic predictions..." and "Criticisms") that presented both sides. Thank you! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.101.138.86 (talk) 22:14, 27 June 2008 (UTC)

Tacit assumptions in introduction

The current introduction reads "Peak oil is the point in time at which the maximum global petroleum production rate is reached, after which the rate of production enters its terminal decline. If global consumption is not mitigated before the peak, the availability of conventional oil will drop and prices will rise, perhaps dramatically."

This appears to state as fact that petroleum production will reach a peak and then immediately and monotonically decline. This is quite possible, but it is not a fact. For example, production could briefly spike, then drop, then rise again, never quite reaching its earlier peak, but only declining significantly later.

You are quite right ; this entry should be corrected accordingly :-).--Environnement2100 (talk) 23:03, 8 January 2008 (UTC)

Similarly, mitigating demand before the peak is neither necessary nor sufficient -- from a strictly logical standpoint -- for keeping availability for dropping.

Before everyone rains hot flaming death upon me, I'm not saying that there is no case for peak oil, or it's "only a theory" or whatever. I'm only saying that the current intro appears to state as fact the case that is in fact only made, and disputed, later on. With that in mind, it might better be tweaked to something more like the following [with notes inserted]:

"Peak oil is the point in time at which the maximum global petroleum production rate is reached [A mathematical necessity, unless the level remains at its peak for some period of time], after which the maximum rate [see below] of production is expected to enter a steady and terminal decline. If global demand [consumption cannot exceed production, but demand can] does not also decline, the availability of conventional oil will drop and prices will rise, perhaps dramatically."

You could also keep in mind the possibility of several maxima, depending on the economics.--Environnement2100 (talk) 23:03, 8 January 2008 (UTC)

Note also "maximum" rate of production. I'm trying to distinguish here between a "soft landing" scenario, in which production declines because demand declines (by some combination of increased energy efficiency and availability of alternatives) and the feared "hard landing", in which demand does not decline but it becomes prohibitively expensive to meet (in which case demand will necessarily decline, but painfully). -Dmh (talk) 01:28, 31 December 2007 (UTC)

This seems to be making some news recently. NJGW (talk) 07:41, 27 January 2008 (UTC)

With respect to the "several maxima," that is true, just as the Prudhoe Bay oil field added a bump (a local maximum) to the U.S. oil production decline curve, but the absolute maximum occurred around 1971, so that was the U.S. oil peak. We can expect a few bumps on the decline curve for world petroleum production, due to new discoveries. However, discoveries peaked long ago. And the more years the world is past peak, the lower production will be, and thus the harder it will be for new discoveries to drive production back up to some new global maximum. Once oil production starts its decline, it might not be smart to fight the decline too hard, since any short-term increase in production will only make the later decline even steeper. That is the nature of a finite resource. See Mexico's Cantarell Field, which is declining rapidly now, and experts are blaming the enhanced recovery techniques used to fight the natural decline of the resource. --Teratornis (talk) 06:27, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

Transportation & "New urbanism"

Hi, first off, I just noticed new urbanism today. I'm wondering about the section you deleted from peak oil: is your only issue with it that it mentions new urbanism? I tried to soften the statement about that "movement", and I don't think it's a plug (though maybe it belongs in the peak oil mitigation section more than the main article). I believe thre rest of the section is based on the writtings of James Howard Kunstler and others, so it's hardly OR. I do think some discussion of suburbs could go there (as I'm sure do those who wrote the section), so care to help flesh out what you would consider acceptable? NJGW (talk) 16:03, 8 January 2008 (UTC)

If there had been a single source in that section making the point it makes, I would have had no problem with it. But as it stands, it reeks of "I told ya so" from the Smart Growthers and New Urbanists, promising energy-profligate suburbs to be "slums of the future". Speaking of which, what is this quoting? There's no source saying it. There's also no guarantee a lack of oil, out of all energy sources, will strand our suburbanites.--Loodog (talk) 16:28, 8 January 2008 (UTC)

So if I cite one source from Kunstler you'd be satisfied that the section can stay? NJGW (talk) 16:39, 8 January 2008 (UTC)

As much of the section as appears in the source.--Loodog (talk) 16:43, 8 January 2008 (UTC)

And do you consider any mention of "new urbanism" to be a plug? In my opinion that's a bit extreme, as any mention of mitigation forms (as in hybrids, wind energy etc.) would be plugs by the same rational. NJGW (talk) 16:51, 8 January 2008 (UTC)

I mostly see it as a plug because of the lack of sources, but also because the availability of one energy source is, at best, peripherally related to housing patterns.--Loodog (talk) 16:59, 8 January 2008 (UTC)

I've added references to Kunstler's book on the subject, as well as a video lecture he gave at TED 2004. I also added other forms of mitigation so it doesn't seem like a plug for "new urbanism". NJGW (talk) 18:46, 8 January 2008 (UTC)

(undent) This claim: "the availability of one energy source is, at best, peripherally related to housing patterns" makes sense only if one or more alternative sources of energy are available for replacing liquid fuels from petroleum to power automobiles at the present level of use, and could be phased in quickly enough to make up for declining oil extraction. (This might require, for example, replacing the entire vehicle fleet, a process which takes about 20 years.) What energy sources do you believe can replace petroleum in motor vehicle applications and sustain the suburban lifestyle at its current scale? I thought everyone was aware that suburban sprawl depends on the automobile, and the automobile depends on petroleum. Petroleum powers about 97% of transportation in the U.S., and housing development in the U.S. since WWII has been almost entirely in neighborhoods built on the assumption that everybody has a personal automobile. Even if somebody knew of a viable replacement for transportation fuels it would take decades to rebuild the vehicle fleet and install the infrastructure. Powering vehicles is very different than powering homes, factories, and other static applications. There are lots of energy options for things that don't move. In contrast, no other existing or readily conceivable energy technology possesses petroleum's combination of desirable properties for vehicles: (historically) low cost, ease of handling and storage, high energy yield per unit of fuel (by both mass and volume), and straightforward design of resulting engines. By comparison, battery technology has several disadvantages: limited range; slow recharging time; all rechargeable batteries steadily lose capacity as they age; greater mass and volume for a given range. Hydrogen is even farther from being a practical energy storage medium for vehicles, and may be less efficient than batteries overall. The disadvantages of alternative vehicle propulsion schemes make consumers reluctant to switch until the price of oil becomes extremely high, and consumers will not be able to replace existing vehicles quickly in any case. The long-term cost of transportation which consumers expect certainly factors into their choice of housing, since a housing purchase essentially commits the buyer to years of some corresponding level of routine travel. --Teratornis (talk) 08:18, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

My further reading about biofuels led me to Jatropha oil which might ultimately become a significant source of motor fuel. Jatropha has some desirable properties, such as being able to grow on extremely marginal land that is unsuitable for food crops. However, vast areas would have to be brought into cultivation to supply even a fraction of current petroleum use, and this would take time to scale up. The EROEI of energy crops in general is currently unclear. --Teratornis (talk) 07:53, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

Effects of peaking on major oil producers?

How much of the recent history of the US has happened partially because of reaching an oil production peak in 1970? I mean, three years latter there's a worldwide oil crisis, the oil markets get ALL shook up through the 1970s while the world shifts gears on industrial and economic growth, then in 1980 this happens [2], followed by a flood of oil on the market (I'm starting to think that article is fundamentally flawed). Detroit gets back on track and we really care about the Middle East! Isreal has started looking important for a while... And now we have to figure out what moves to make while China and India grab for more oil, prices are through the roof, we have NO idea what will happen in the Middle East.

Are there any sources that talk about these sorts of things authoritatively? There's at least one article that mentions other producers peaking. What happened to the other nations that have peaked and/or become net importers? NJGW (talk) 23:23, 11 January 2008 (UTC)

Most if not all of the books about peak oil discuss some or all of the factors and events you mention. Also try searching YouTube for "peak oil"; you will find many videos on the subject, along with the CEO or Exxon denying peak oil. It's a simple matter of history that the U.S. began ramping up its military activities in the Middle East shortly after becoming an oil importer, with the scale of activity increasing as the U.S. began importing increasingly more oil. --Teratornis (talk) 08:27, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

There is a documentary about Cuba's response to its oil crisis resulting from a loss of imports from the former Soviet Union. See: The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil. --Teratornis (talk) 08:30, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

Worldwide

On 7 January 2008, User:Loodog added the worldwide template indicating the article didn't have a worldwide viewpoint and focused only on the U.S. I beg to differ. I think this article has great worldwide perspective, and in fact much more than most other articles on Wikipedia. I don't see the basis for Loodog's edit, so I think the tag should be removed. ~ UBeR (talk) 18:06, 24 January 2008 (UTC)

Agreed. If anyone feels different, they should express their concerns here instead of plopping a tag and leaving with no explanation. NJGW (talk) 18:44, 24 January 2008 (UTC)

I think section four could probably be a bit more diversified--where information is available. That's about all I can see. ~ UBeR (talk) 19:35, 24 January 2008 (UTC)

External Links

There seems to be a ridiculous amount of spam there, and a lot of the links should be removed, especially in the general "websites" category. --TheSeer (TalkˑContribs) 03:05, 31 January 2008 (UTC)

I didn't see any spam in the "websites" category (besides that chat link that keeps reappearing somehow), but I did see a bunch of stuff that was extra. I took that out, fixed a few links, and moved a few links to the mitigation of peak oil and predicting the timing of peak oil articles. I don't have time to go through the rest. NJGW (talk) 04:44, 31 January 2008 (UTC)

This really is way beyond normal. We don't need to link to every site with "peak oil" in its name. We already provide many external links in the "further reading" section, not to mention in references. ·:· Will Beback ·:· 04:55, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

Questions

If there are 1.5 trillion barrels total resource and we have used .5 trillion, .5 trillion are uneconomic to extract and .5 trillion or 500 billion remain; then at a rate of consumption of 85 million barrels a day, the numbr of days remaining till its all gone is 500,000/85 or 5882 days. that brings us to 2024 till the last drop is gone. 69.39.100.2 (talk) 18:29, 9 February 2008 (UTC)

I've seen estimates closer to 2039 (assuming constant rates of production and consumption, which isn't likely). Accepting the issue as a given and addressing it directly is more important than this particular prediction though. NJGW (talk) 20:33, 9 February 2008 (UTC)

How much short of when the last drop of oil is gone, is the last drop of patience with CAFE standards that allow SUV's to be averaged into an automakers fleet rather than broken out to determine fuel efficiency. 69.39.100.2 (talk) 18:29, 9 February 2008 (UTC)

The last drop will never be gone, it will just be so expencive that no one will want to buy it (or as some say, once alternatives are in place (cross fingers), it will be cheap again, but not attractive). The auto industry has always had a strangle hold on the US: many cities and small towns had pretty extencive public transportation systems in the late 1800s and early 1900s, until the auto industry pressured governments to dismatle the infrastructures (to make room for auto roads) and disband the services (to encourage driving). The auto industry has long been deeply tied to petroleum, ever since the diesel engine's patents (originally designed to run on peanut oil) were bought out and licenced only as petroleum burning. That's a long history of private power and public complacency to try and change. NJGW (talk) 20:33, 9 February 2008 (UTC)

Aside from the obvious conclusion that some people aren't going to be able to get theirs at any price in the very short future, and most people aren't going to be able to afford to commute to work in a car using a gasoline engine, doesn't that also affect the use of oil to make plastics, lubricants and other petrochemical products we don't intend to burn.? What happens to electric cars when the electric plants burning fossil fuels to make electricity cease to function?

What happens to our ability to develop alternative energy if people can't use cheap fossil fuels to provide the energy to develop the alternatives. 69.39.100.2 (talk) 18:29, 9 February 2008 (UTC)

Yes, plastics which need to be subjected to heat (in any electrical/computer or cooking applications for example), as well as many (majority of?) everyday chemicals come from petroleum. Forget electric cars, what happens to all vehicles, all computers, most fertilizers/pesticides/herbicides, many pharmecuticals, and just about anything else we take for granted in the modern world? Electricity can be generated (solar, wind, biomechanical, tidal, etc) but what of the power plants and infrastructure needed (not that it matters if we can't make electronics)? It might turn out to be a very different world if we keep burning all our oil in our engines and not recycling (pretty ineffecient from what I've heard) what we've already turned into plastic. NJGW (talk) 20:33, 9 February 2008 (UTC)

Petroleum is not the only feedstock for making plastics, just the cheapest and most convenient one. While replacing petroleum as a feedstock will be difficult, that's probably not as serious a problem as replacing petroleum as a fuel for motor vehicles, because transportation adds so little value. Converting petroleum into petrochemicals and pharmaceuticals creates far more value than burning petroleum as fuel, so vehicle applications will come under pressure first. And nobody knows of a viable substitute for liquid fuels from petroleum that could possibly scale up enough in the next 20 years to sustain the current level of gaswasting, let alone the projected growth. The result is that people are almost certainly going to have to travel less as the supply of petroleum declines. --Teratornis (talk) 08:38, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

Factoring in global warming and rising sea levels will all the nuke plants using the oceans to cool their process find themselves underwater, and likewise the wind turbines being placed offshore? Will the greenhouse affect dampen the ardor of those who want to go electric with photovoltaics? 69.39.100.2 (talk) 18:29, 9 February 2008 (UTC)

I think there are bigger problems than if we'll have enough electricity. See above. NJGW (talk) 20:33, 9 February 2008 (UTC)

Do biofuels expend more carbon than they save? 69.39.100.2 (talk) 18:29, 9 February 2008 (UTC)

Maybe. Partly because the infrastructure isn't in place, partly because corn is so energy intencive to grow, and partly because lots of natural land (forrests and rain forrests for example) are being plowed under to make room for biofuel crops. This is a global warming problem though, not a peak oil problem. NJGW (talk) 20:33, 9 February 2008 (UTC)

This is one of the big problems with allowing big agribusinesses to drive crop selection and farming practices. They have no long-term investment in the land being farmed, so they have no multi-decade incentive to promote soil conservation and improvement. They're happy to deplete carbon reserves in the soil if it means more profit this year.LeadSongDog (talk) 19:46, 14 March 2008 (UTC)

Regardless of how much carbon is expended, biofuels rely on photosynthesis for their energy, and that's even less efficient than photovoltaics. —Preceding unsigned comment added by ThVa (talk • contribs) 09:56, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

What happens to long term solutions if we have already killed everything that walks or crawls or swims in the seas before we get to the solution part?69.39.100.2 (talk) 18:29, 9 February 2008 (UTC)

Don't worry. We may kill ourselves and 99% of all living things, but unless we literally blow up the earth, something will be left over. Just not us. NJGW (talk) 20:33, 9 February 2008 (UTC)

It's unlikely that ecological collapse will totally wipe out humans. For example, see Easter Island, where Polynesian settlers completely destroyed the lush native forests of the island and most native animal species. With no trees to build fishing boats, the Islanders could not get out to fish, the food supply greatly decreased, and the Islanders resorted to warfare and cannibalism, as the human population crashed 90%. By the time Europeans reached the island, the survivors were living primitively, and unable to resurrect their almost-forgotten culture because they had destroyed their ecosystem. We might have a chance to do better, because unlike the Easter Islanders, we can learn from history. But judging from all the gaswasters who are out on the roads wasting gas like there's no tomorrow, it's not clear that we are much smarter. I do have hope, however, because of Wikipedia itself. It we can build something as complicated as Wikipedia, without any need to physically commute to central offices, what can't we build this way? We might survive peak oil if we can convert almost the entire economy over to something like the wiki model. This can work even for manufacturing; see open source hardware. --Teratornis (talk) 19:24, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

Hubbert's curve vs. Moore's law

I've been reading a lot of doom and gloom about peak oil, and the worst-case scenarios certainly sound grim, but it seems none of the peak oil experts have a solid handle on Moore's law, other than some recommendations in passing to replace some physical travel with telecommuting (but I have yet to see any discussion of how the economics are shifting with time). Similarly, it seems almost none of the information technology folks who are driving Moore's law know much about peak oil or what they should be doing about it. A large fraction of transportation essentially occurs only (or largely) to move information, either in the form of human brains (personal transporation) or packaged into finished goods (freight transportation). (We manufacture goods in centralized factories primarily to cope with the information and skill demands; but the open source hardware paradigm may someday give us decentralized manufacturing, allowing small communities to get closer to self-sufficient in terms of materials, while shipping the manufacturing know-how through wires at near zero cost thanks to Moore's law.) Once we hit the back side of Hubbert's curve, the cost of physical transportation will steadily increase. At the same time, Moore's law continues driving down the cost of telecommunication. Thus it seems staggeringly obvious that perhaps every workable scheme for replacing some instances of physical transportation with telecommunication must eventually become profitable if it isn't already. I'd like to locate some reliable sources that explain this coherently, but I'm not finding any. The scope for eliminating physical transportation with telecommuting, telerobotics, and open source hardware is enormous. Although it would be a self-reference, it would be nice to mention Wikipedia as an example of a vastly complex remote collaborative project that almost completely eliminates the need for personal travel (even though we have the hugely ironic exception of Jimmy Wales who jets constantly around the world to meet Wikipedians, such travel is incidental to the actual work of building the encyclopedia). If we can build Wikipedia this way, what can't we build this way? The mass adoption of corporate wikis could play a key role in the "emancipation" of the work force that Matthew Simmons recommends as a response to coping with life after the peak. Anyway, I hope that this isn't original research, but that somebody somewhere has elaborated on these obvious points in a reliable source we can cite. Does anybody know of one? If no such sources exist, I may have to write one. --Teratornis (talk) 09:06, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

It's interesting to think of a technical civilization which manufactures distributed and decentral. However, while it is relativel easy to replace business travel partially with teleconferences, any number of bits transmitted would get me something eadible beneath my laptop. Consider, also, that since ancient times, cities were founded at river passages, harbours, and waterways, and that transport of such goods as salt and silk formed antique merchant routes. Up to the point that some continent was discovered accidentally in 1492 when some spanish captain was looking for ways to get to west india. Now, while silk was relatively irrelevant to the daily life of the 15th century, today there is a host of raw materials which are transported around the globe. While you can produce clothes almost everywhere, the cotton you need doesn't grow in Canada, and the steel for the loom may not be found in Arkansas. It would be difficult to get things done without physical trade. --82.113.121.16 (talk) 08:59, 25 June 2008 (UTC) (Joise)

"Bell shaped", it's not "bell shaped"

(moved discussion to Talk:Hubbert curve as it's much more relevant to that article)

Peak oil has arrived

Peak oil has arrived: the price went from 90 dollars a barrel to 110 in a week; that seems to be peak oil... —Preceding unsigned comment added by 83.211.20.5 (talk) 15:42, 13 March 2008 (UTC)

Well, the price of oil would certainly go up if production had peaked, and there are plenty of people that say that it has... but we can't just go by price alone. Look at the skyrocketing demand, look at economic fears. On the other hand, one indicator that we can look at is the fact that OPEC claims not to want to increase production (which can only hurt them once we start cutting back on consumption en masse)... NJGW (talk) 19:51, 13 March 2008 (UTC)

Oh, and I should say that this is a space for discussing the article and what could be added, removed or changed in it. Not a discussion of our interpretations of current events. NJGW (talk) 19:53, 13 March 2008 (UTC)

Oil isn't really going up much, the dollar is just dropping. 76.90.49.187 (talk) 23:31, 13 March 2008 (UTC)

That all depends on how you define going up or down... the purchasing price of the dollar (in electronics, food, other manufactured goods etc.) isn't going down, so maybe the other currencies are actually going up. But then again their purchasing power isn't going up, so what the h#ll is going on??? It's all so artificially influenced at this point anyway that we don't have any really useful tools for evaluating anything but the dropping of production rates, and even that is hard to find out. I've tried to bring some real economists in on this discussion with no luck. NJGW (talk) 14:21, 14 March 2008 (UTC)

Yes, but many food products are made in America which limits the dollar impact (although inflation still affects them). A vast amount of electronics and manufactured goods are manufactured in China which whose Yuan has a very limited float against the dollar.76.90.49.187 (talk) 18:20, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

I don't get why the 'everybody panic' angle

The concept comes across as so doom & gloom, but from the article, I can't see why this is considered to be a likely possibility. If the prices started going way up, people would find lots of their little trips and so forth aren't so necessary after all, and would reduce usage. We've had shocks before, and while they harm the economy, it's hardly disastrous. Consider the rationing that goes on during wars as well. While it might not be pleasant, it hardly seems like it would be catastrophic. 76.90.49.187 (talk) 23:35, 13 March 2008 (UTC)

Several factors make the post-peak oil production (extraction) decline different from previous shortages:

• Previous shortages were temporary. It's easier to go several months, or even several years, with a problem that eventually goes away, than to have a shortage that gets worse every year. It's like holding one's breath for a minute, even two minutes, which almost everyone can do, vs. never breathing again.
• Oil is not just fuel for personal transportation. There is a lot of slack in personal transportation as you note; just count all the single-passenger SUVs on the road. However, about half of transportation oil goes to goods shipment, and about 10% to air travel. Those two applications don't have much slack to cut. Trucks and airplanes are already running at close to their practical full loads.
• Oil is also important as feedstock for petrochemicals, and is vital for industrial agriculture. Again, in those applications there is not much slack to cut. At the moment we are essentially eating petroleum, with some 10 calories of petroleum input to create 1 calorie of food.
• World population is still growing.
• Demand is surging in the huge developing economies of India and China. The whole world aspires to American model, more or less.
• Oil exporting nations have their own internal demand growth.
• Almost everyone is either in denial about peak oil or hasn't heard of it yet. This general lack of concern is the real danger, as the problem would be manageable if everyone had understood it soon enough.

After oil extraction peaks and begins its irreversible decline, oil-importing nations such as the U.S. may have to live with 4% less oil each year than they used the year before. For years and years the liquid fuel shortage will get worse and worse. A large fraction of the U.S. population lives in sprawling suburbs built after WWII which can hardly function without personal automobiles. There is no doubt the skyrocketing price of oil will force consumers to conserve, and their reward for conserving each year will be to conserve even more the next year. It looks to be quite interesting. I've already adapted to not owning an automobile, bicycling for fun and personal transportation, learning to edit collaboratively on wikis (something the peakniks should mention more often but usually don't), and I've learned to live with almost no heat during Ohio winters (we have a natural gas crisis on the way too). I suppose next I need to take up gardening. As you mention, many of the adaptations are not rocket science, but when the economy starts contracting that makes it harder to generate capital investment to rebuild everything for what comes after petroleum. If things get bad enough, civilization could start to break down, and then we won't be able to rebuild and there could be a massive die-back of world population to the pre-industrial level. That's the worst-case scenario. Given that the worst-case scenario is realistic I'd say there's reason to panic, or at least take the threat seriously. Obviously panic isn't going to help anything. --Teratornis (talk) 08:14, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

If you prefer optimism, however, check out Amory Lovins. His book Winning the Oil Endgame is free for download. I haven't read the book yet, but I watched his TED talk, and it seems Lovins relies on the official Energy Information Administration forecasts of oil production which may be too optimistic. Plus the book is from 2005, which means a lot of the research was probably from around 2004, before the Oil price increases since 2003 had gotten very far. But to Lovins it seems higher prices for oil only make his ideas for conservation and switching to alternatives more profitable for corporations to implement. It is rather interesting how the oil supply situation seems to have recently changed a lot of thinking. For example, a National Geographic article about peak oil from just a few years ago has a suprisingly unalarmed tone. --Teratornis (talk) 07:09, 1 April 2008 (UTC)

But I wasn't asking for a rebuttal here, I was saying the article itself doesn't represent this argument, it merely assumes it. 76.90.49.187 (talk) 18:00, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

The somewhat bland tone of the article might have something to do with Wikipedia's neutral point of view policy. Anyone can edit Wikipedia, so anything that sounds over-the-top alarmist (even if it turns out to be correct someday), will seem non-neutral now. It's hard to describe how bad peak oil might be without sounding alarmist and thus one-sided, leading to a content dispute. (On Wikipedia, a person can write whatever he or she wants, but the more forceful a claim is, the more it is likely to attract other editors who will disagree with it, and change it. The trick for everyone who writes on Wikipedia is to guess what other editors will not change.) Also, Wikipedia is not a crystal ball. Unfortunately, since the average reader has probably only heard the media reports about rising costs for petroleum and food, which usually contain no serious analysis as to why these prices are rising, nor usually any prediction of how high prices could go in the future, the reader may not have a grasp on the worst-case scenarios for peak oil. The section Peak oil#The Hirsch Report is merely an overview of the report's conclusions; this brief summary of the report is a lot more sobering to read. The various doomer sites such as Life After the Oil Crash dispense with the neutral point of view and paint a very bleak picture. For comparison, during the 1973 oil crisis, the U.S. experienced a temporary, one-time shortfall of 5%-7% in petroleum. The economic impact was substantial, but not the same for everyone of course. After peak oil, the petroleum available to the U.S. may continuously decline by comparable amounts every year. The impact on the world's poor may be catastrophic; already we are seeing the 2007–2008 world food price crisis, even before world oil production has begun to decline much. (Reading the media reports cited in the food price crisis article is interesting; the reports tend to focus on how bad the food crisis is right now, but no one seems to be aware that if Hubbert peak theory is correct, the recent run-up in oil and grain prices is barely just beginning.) People who are rioting over food prices today may be actually starving in large numbers next year, or the year after, or in five years. Wealthy nations like the U.S. won't be able to bail them out with food aid indefinitely, because the steadily worsening oil shortage will shrink the economy and force all available capital, farmland, etc. to go toward renewable energy projects. I would imagine that by the time the U.S. has seen two consecutive years of declining oil supply, the realization will sink in that the U.S. is facing its own national emergency that it should have started preparing for 20 years ago, but did not, and at that point saving the rest of the world may no longer be an option. The U.S. and other industrialized nations may be lucky to save themselves. Of course the future is unpredictable; who knows, there might be a miracle breakthrough in cold fusion tomorrow that would take care of all our energy problems for a while. Not that I would bet on it. The only thing I would bet on is the future turning out to be not exactly what anyone expected in all the details, but it looks to me as if peak oil is going to be a big, big deal any way it plays out. --Teratornis (talk) 05:40, 19 April 2008 (UTC)

I see what you're saying. I guess to me when I read "peak oil" as basically a simple concept that at some point production will peak. This seems fairly mathematically obvious (even if oil is being regenerated, which I don't believe), so apparently the term "peak oil" also includes assumptions of apparently dire consequences. This seems implied by your statement that people are in denial about peak oil, to which my first reaction was "what is there to deny?"

Although I don't see why the market won't be able to handle this. If gas ends up $10+ a gallon, I think carpooling will stop seeming so inconvenient and difficult, for instance. Lots of inefficiencies will be found and squeezed out. There are more and more Prius's appearing. If gas continues to be expensive, the reluctance to use Nuclear power will evaporate and can effectively replace oil based power for most uses.

But, who knows, I don't have a crystal ball either. 76.168.64.243 (talk) 21:30, 20 April 2008 (UTC)

I suspect (a) peak oil is a reality but (b) it won't bring "the end of industrial civilization". For one thing, coal can be fairly easily substituted for oil for most purposes. And we still have plenty of coal. Whether we WANT to start burning coal in a big way is another question, but we may have little choice. It's only in the last 50 years, for instance, that cities have spread out as the assumption that everyone has personal motorised transportation has taken hold - in another 50 years - the lifetime of a house - the trend can be reversed (in some countries this has already started) and we can go back to high-density cities (thus freeing up agricultural land as well). The internet means we don't NEED to commute miles to work every day.

Exile (talk) 18:45, 6 May 2008 (UTC)

Yes, Wikipedia itself is a model for high-efficiency telecommuting. Not many people are doing anything more complicated than what Wikipedia is doing, and we do it all without needing to physically travel anywhere. However, Wikipedia only has 48,252,125 registered users in the English version, and of those, only maybe 5% to 10% are far enough along with learning how to edit that they could do actual paying work on a corporate wiki. So this is small compared to the global workforce. But we have the proof of concept right here, and if telecommuting had to expand enormously, it could, and probably fairly quickly. See my comments above about the interplay between Hubbert's curve and Moore's law. However, not everybody is a smart computer geek. Lots of average working people will get squeezed hard by rising oil prices. The main question is how fast the supply of oil falls below the amount people "want" to burn. A gradual decrease of 1% per year would probably not cause civilization to collapse; people would have time to adapt. But if supply drops by 10% per year, that might create feedback cycles that cause one sector after another to break down, possibly leading to a collapse. The Hirsch report tried to analyze this. --Teratornis (talk) 05:44, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

Commuting to work is only perhaps 20% of total trips in the US, the rest being things like shopping, kid transport and visiting. These are all much less practical to telecommute. And a considerable portion of transport energy is used in the movement of goods (as mentioned earlier). Railroad companies in the US are frantically laying more track (trains are considerably more efficient than trucks, and can be moved to electrical energy more easily), but chances are, if we really are looking at 4%/pa decrease in supply we'll run into real shortages long before everyone is doing their work via wikipedia.--Jaded-view (talk) 06:10, 18 May 2008 (UTC)

The breakdown in the U.S., I think, is about 70% of oil for transport, 20% for agriculture, 10% for petrochemicals. (Rational discussion requires accurate numbers, so it would be worth analyzing our petroleum use in detail, as well as the trends.) The U.S. has mostly moved away from oil for electricity and heating, although a small percentage of oil still goes for those uses. Of transport, about half is for personal transport (what traffic engineers call "primary consumption of transportation"), and half is for goods shipment ("secondary consumption of transportation"). The part of personal transport which is critical for the economy is commuting to work, and that is also the primary reason why people buy automobiles, since most other forms of personal transportation are optional or negotiable by comparison. Online shopping is already far more advanced than online working, and can easily expand to the degree necessary. One fully-loaded delivery truck can eliminate 50-100 lightly-loaded personal automobiles, so shopping can become far more efficient. People physically travel to stores so they can obtain information about products by looking at them (or in many cases, by looking at their packages). The actual payload of a shopping trip is usually just a small fraction of what a personal automobile can haul, so there is huge slack for the market to eliminate there. As far as kid transport and visiting, these are expendable forms of entertainment, which are in no way essential for maintaining industrial civilization. If the kids have to start riding their bikes to soccer practice, instead of having soccer mom drive them in the minivan, it's no big deal. Bicycling can only become steadily more practical as crushingly high fuel prices begin emptying the roadways of cars. Perhaps 95% of personal travel is not necessary, as in, we could easily live without it, at no threat to civilization, or we could virtualize it, in the case of shopping and telecommuting. We will still need emergency services and trips to the doctor, at least until Moore's law iterates far enough to give us telerobotics sufficiently good to allow service workers to do any job remotely that they can do with their own hands in front of them. You are correct that the other sectors of petroleum use have less slack to give. Replacing trucks with more-efficient trains and barges takes time. Agriculture and petrochemicals will continue to need either petroleum or some sort of in-kind biofuel/biofeedstock replacement. Our biggest source of slack petroleum use by far is personal travel, so we can expect the market to hammer personal travel the hardest as oil prices continue to skyrocket. If personal travel accounts for about 30% of the petroleum use in the U.S., and if personal travel will absorb the best part of any import supply reductions, that gives us about 10 years' worth of slack if the oil available on the import market drops by 3% of our current level per year. Moore's law will continue to improve computers in the meantime - ten years ago, not only did Wikipedia not exist, but probably nobody would have believed Wikipedia in its current form could be as successful as it is. Therefore, it is plausible that ten years from now, computers will be that much better for remote collaboration. Which is to say, we may have online systems in ten years that are as unimaginably good to us now as Wikipedia was unimaginably good to us ten years ago. And then in twenty years we could have a similar increment of improvement. --Teratornis (talk) 15:38, 19 May 2008 (UTC)

Massive destructive edits by Bobo159

I started going through Bobo159's edits point by point, but soon realized he/she was massively missrepresenting sources and removing sourced data. I went ahead and changed all but one of his/her edits (one by one with reasoning), though only the last batch are complete reverts. These changes undid months of consensus building (much of it from before I started editing this article) and needs to be discussed here before being applied to the article. My main reasoning is laid out in the edit summeries, though I am happy to discuss individual issues here. NJGW (talk) 17:06, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

Reasons for all edits were given in the edit summaries; that you don't like my changes is not a valid reason to delete them. For example, consider this change you reverted: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Peak_oil&diff=200833466&oldid=200832661 Your edit summary makes no sense in terms of what I wrote - I said the EWG was talking about the USGS's 95% level, same as the original. Based on that, you seem to be simply reverting my edits without reading them. I'm going to revert back any where your edit summaries clearly show you haven't read the edit.

I started reading them, and when I saw that you were misrepresenting sources, selectively reporting information to fit your POV, and deleting sourced material, I decided it was not worth my time and that the burden of proof was on you to show that your edits were needed. As far as this edit goes, are the numbers reported in the source you provide p95 EUR? p50? p5??? Are those the only surveys that were done from '00-02? what about those done after '02? We can't tell because the source doesn't tell us, therefore how can you compare these to specifically stated p95 numbers? What is the notability of your author and publication? NJGW (talk) 17:50, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

Again, consider this edit of yours: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Peak_oil&diff=200810907&oldid=200724793 The article was claiming that oil production per capita has been declining, I added numbers to show that that is simply a false statement, and you called me "misleading". What's misleading is to cherry-pick a single data point (1980) to give the impression that per capita oil supply has been falling constantly, when the fact of the matter is that it's been stable or rising for the last 20 years. Changed the text to present both the sharp fall from 1980 and the slow rise from 1985.

Again, you are misrepresenting both this article and the data. It states accurately that oil production per capita has decreased since the 70's. You cherry pick the one date when oil consumption happened to have bottomed out because of the 1979 oil crisis, after consumption per capita did rebound slightly, but also because population growth has slowed a little. Like my summery said, the numbers are dynamic (just look at the way oil prices have bounced up and down seemingly wildly while the average rises steadily since 2003). NJGW (talk) 17:50, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

Or this edit - http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Peak_oil&diff=200820590&oldid=200816416 - where you complain that I'm deleting sourced material, when I'm actually restoring a source! Not to mention that the article was factually wrong - the EIA does not show a production peak in oil supply in May 2005 - and your reversion has restored that error. I'm restoring this edit, and basically all the other ones you reverted, since you appear not to have read them. If you want to change what I've written, at least read it first. Bobo159 (talk) 10:41, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

Again, you're cherry picking numbers. A slight rise here or there does not change a flat trend. Peak oil is about crude sucked out of the ground, not natural gas, not refinary growth. Then you erase the January data by the US EIA and replace it with February data from the IEA (who by the way also count strategic reserves in supply, meaning they count what's already been pulled out of the ground in previous years). Want to debate the merits of these two sources? Fine, but be aware you're not the first to make the mistake that those two are the same and that supply equals production. If you're just going to pop in every few months and make big changes with no discussion, that's not so fine. NJGW (talk) 17:50, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

(Undent) Please explain how this is POV? It explains the the point for the section, as well as how CERA gets their figures. NJGW (talk) 18:28, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

What specifically is wrong with what you have removed here? OPEC has not aknowledged peak oil, the projected that oil would remain around $50-60 until 2030, and they use the USGA's p05 numbers to do so (well they claim to use USGA numbers, but the 3300 and 1700 figures don't apear in the USGA figures, so I wrote (sic)). Again, you push your POV. Out of curiousity, do you have a job that gives you a [wp:COI] for editing here? NJGW (talk) 18:34, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

It'd be nice if you two would slow down a bit so the rest of the world can follow what you're arguing about. Taking the last point first, bobo deleted <quote>OPEC has never acknowledged imminent Peak oil concerns.</quote> Clearly this is simple follow-through on a fact check. If someone can provide a WP:RS reference in which OPEC acknowleged imminent peak oil concerns there would be no debate, but to find a RS saying they never did so may be somewhat more of a challenge. As NJGW above says <quote>OPEC has aknowledged[sic] peak oil</quote> it is unclear what the intent of the objection is.LeadSongDog (talk) 19:45, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

:::Whoops, thanks for catching my missing "not" LeadSongDog. I've fixed it above, so if you want to you can fix it where you quote me and erase this statement. NJGW (talk) 20:11, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

I specifically didn't re-revert any of Bobo's edits a second time, and put in a request for protection of the page (which hasn't been commented on or acted upon over the past 3 hours)until more than just me and Bobo have had a chance to discuss this. I've gone through the history a bit and see that Bobo pops up ever few months just to edit this article (Nov. 07, Aug. 07, and then a big gap in any editing until Aug. 06). I wonder if he/she does any other editing in the breaks (which would suggest that this account is for avoiding scrutiny or stiring up controversy). At the very least this account is avoiding consensus building by trying to disappear for a while until people aren't paying attention to the article changes as closely. NJGW (talk) 20:22, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

If you really suspect that practice, there are of course proper responses short of edit wars. I'm not going down that rabbit hole.LeadSongDog (talk) 20:38, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

I see there's a recent development at User talk:Bobo159. Continuing the above, is there an uncited source for the statement OPEC has not acknowledged peak oil in the article or was it truly unsubstantiated? Leaving a fact tag on it for five months seems like long enough....LeadSongDog (talk) 21:46, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

I'm not sure what the history of that particular statement is. I have found this, but at that source's source the OPEC rep is not an OPEC rep at all, rather he is Libya's representative to OPEC. He does voice concerns over peak oil, but in OPEC's statements from July 2007 claim the opposite. Those OPEC statements (that the conventional oil resource base is sufficient to satisfy demand increases over the projected period until 2030 at a price of $50-60 per barrel, increasing afterwards to account for inflation) show that OPEC are either trying to look good or are out in LaLa land. It also shows that they don't officially view any force other than inflation acting on the price of oil for another 22 years. NJGW (talk) 00:41, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

Do you always assume maliciousness on the part of anyone you disagree with? Had it not occurred to you that I only edit this article every few months because I only read this article every few months? Browbeating is not the same as building consensus.Bobo159 (talk) 11:18, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

(undent) If there is no more discussion on the rebuttles I've made to Bobo above, or suggestions for what the article should say, I'm going to assume Bobo is not interested in concensus building or correct representation of sources, and I will revert his/her changes in 48 hours. NJGW (talk) 16:43, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

I support this. I would also suggest to User:Bobo159 and future editors that rather than make many controversial deletions to Peak oil at once, a better approach would be to pick one change and discuss it on this talk page first, so we can deal with each change one at a time. How about a rule of one change proposal per talk page heading? It's hard to sort out many changes under a single heading. Side comment: I noticed that one of the changes contains the term 'peakist' which should be peaknik, a jargon term for which we have a defining article. I'll go edit that if it's still there. --Teratornis (talk) 18:46, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

I hadn't realized that most of those edits would be considered controversial, although I should - this appears to be a touchy topic. So that's a good suggestion, and I'll certainly keep it in mind.Bobo159 (talk) 11:18, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

A rather less self-serving assumption would be that I was simply busy, and don't have time to immediately leap to discuss your every concern. Apropos that, though, you don't have to worry - I have neither the time nor the inclination to get into an edit war with someone who obviously has much more time and emotional investment in the topic than I do. From my perspective, what happened was I had some free time, tried to update an article (attributing statements to the staters, updating numbers to the most recent data, softening what I saw as POV, etc.), and someone came along, started insulting me, and reverted everything I'd done with reasons that made it clear he hadn't read what I'd written. There are, to my eye, still problems with the article (it rambles, makes a few dodgy claims, and has substantial areas with POV), but it kind of removes the incentive to try contributing if it all gets immediately deleted out of hand by someone who insults you for your effort. If I do try contributing to this article again, however, I'll follow the wise suggestion of Teratornis and assume any changes will be controversial.Bobo159 (talk) 11:18, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

A surprising number of topics on Wikipedia are controversial; some are really controversial. That's kind of unavoidable with 48,252,125 registered users and a similar number of unregistereds. Any article which inherently involves predictions about the future, with vested interests on all sides, is sure to be controversial. George W. Bush was probably correct when he accused his fellow Americans of being "addicted to oil", and I can't think of any form of addiction which is free from controversy. However, Peak oil is downright genial by comparison to some topics on Wikipedia (try making substantial changes to anything relating to Islam, Scientology, etc.). The safest assumption is that usually additions to articles may be less controversial than substantial changes to existing material, and it's better to test the waters with small changes before trying big ones. Asking for discussion on an article's talk page and getting responses before making a serious change invites other editors to weigh in. That may avoid triggering territorial defensive urges from reptillian hindbrains by changing an article with no prior warning. As an example of a potentially controversial change I made, which seems to have "stuck", was to add a section to the Aviation history article. The section 2001-Future is incredibly optimistic compared to peakniks such as David Goodstein and Richard Heinberg who claim that passenger air travel will effectively cease by a decade or two after peak oil. So rather than hack up the existing section, I simply added another subsection, fairly bland, The challenge of peak oil, which at least puts the idea out there that hey, aviation may have a serious fuel shortage in the future (with the implication that if you care about aviation, you might want to look into it). I don't claim to know the future anyway; if I did, I'd become a billionaire commodities trader like Richard Rainwater. --Teratornis (talk) 06:17, 19 April 2008 (UTC)

Peaknik as a pejorative?

Peaknik is an epithet or pejorative. Please refrain from using it. Peakists do not call themselves Peaknik. It's like calling a feminist a femonazi or a black person an (N-word). I really resent this POV. Kgrr (talk) 01:19, 1 April 2008 (UTC)

The Peaknik article does not mention this. Do you have a reliable source for this claim? I don't necessarily dispute it, I would just like to see it sourced properly in our peaknik article. I guess I'm a bit puzzled as to why anyone who knows about peak oil would resent being called a peaknik - I'd like to think we hope we are wrong, and everyone can have a good laugh at our expense. (If civilization collapses, any satisfaction I might draw from telling people I told them so probably wouldn't make up for the downsides of, uh, the collapse of civilization. I'm not an anarcho-primitive, although I do look forward to a world with fewer automobiles.) Also see Euphemism#The "Euphemism Treadmill". If "peaknik" has taken on negative connotations for some people, then as long as those people dislike the objects of their pejorative, it's only a matter of time before they transfer those connotations onto the next euphemism. Which is to say, it's hard to outrun the euphemism treadmill by endlessly relabeling oneself, and anyone who tries to do that probably hasn't listened to Steven Pinker. In any case, I'm encouraged to hear someone claiming that peaknik is a pejorative; that suggests some "outsiders" have heard about peak oil. When I ask people in real life if they've heard of peak oil, most have not. The main danger of peak oil is the near-total ignorance of the public, so I would say there's no such thing as bad publicity. The peak oil crisis will unfold in slow motion, so people will have plenty of time to recognize that things are transpiring the way those crazy peakniks predicted. I mean come on, the first guy to figure out anything new and different that challenges the status quo gets laughed at, or worse, until indisputable evidence comes in to support his ideas. The end of unlimited growth in petroleum consumption is more than most petroleum addicts can imagine, after all. We can't expect everyone to instantly embrace the idea. Most will have to be in severe pain before they wake up. In the United States, for example, automobile dependency is nearly universal, and for lots of people it is three or four generations old. Almost everybody drives, and every living relative has used cars as far back as the oral tradition goes. But the year is 2008, and we have the fivefold oil price increase since 2003 to talk about. It's getting a little harder for people to laugh at the peakniks now. When petroleum hits $300/bbl, there will be a lot more peakniks. --Teratornis (talk) 06:05, 1 April 2008 (UTC)

Terminology

It seems much of the confusion around this topic is because of the blurring of concepts between the Total resource, Economic resource, Proven reserve, Recoverable reserve, etc. A clear set of nutshell definitions here or elsewhere would be very helpful in avoiding confusion over the size of each of these. LeadSongDog (talk) 22:16, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

Most of these appear in other articles, but do not seem to have definitions there either (we can search for them with {{Google wikipedia}} which I like better than Wikipedia's built-in search because Google tolerates misspellings and word stems):

• Search Wikipedia with Google for: "Total resource"
• Search Wikipedia with Google for: "Economic resource"
• Search Wikipedia with Google for: "Proven reserve"
• Search Wikipedia with Google for: "Recoverable reserve"

--Teratornis (talk) 05:57, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

Defining such terms is one thing; quantifying them is another. Matthew Simmons, for example, wants open audits of all the world's major oil fields. Most petroleum-exporting countries consider their own reserve estimates as state secrets. The resulting uncertainty tends to paralyze industry and government leaders around the world, as it's impossible to predict when a shortage might occur and how severe it might be. All the uncertainty creates the perfect excuse for business as usual - politicians generally cannot motivate people to make sacrifices until those people are in serious pain. Also, I'm not sure we need separate articles to define each term, because of WP:NOT#DICTIONARY. It might be better to define them in separate subsections of Petroleum and we could then link to them from instances of these terms elsewhere. --Teratornis (talk) 06:10, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

Oil reserves lists some definitions, but not in linkable sections. We could add invisible name anchors to make the definitions linkable. --Teratornis (talk) 08:26, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

These are concepts describing a resource, not just dictionary definitions. The concepts apply to other resources such as Coal, Gas, Uranium, Phosphorus, Copper and other metals. I think it may be very useful to create separate articles for use in other peak scenarios like Peak coal, Peak gas, Peak uranium, Peak phosphorus, Peak copper and Peak metal for example.Kgrr (talk) 01:05, 1 April 2008 (UTC)

A general note about the complexity of peak oil

I'd like to mention that Peak oil is a very complex topic, and while it seems likely to affect almost everyone who can afford a computer (and thus have a chance of participating on Wikipedia), the vast majority of people haven't heard much about it yet. Many claims of peakniks are likely to seem absurd to an average person in an advanced nation, who sees the roads jammed with automobiles every day and has never known anything else. Some editors have tried to help by collecting a basic collection of links into the {{Peak oil}} template. I would suggest to anyone who wants to substantially edit Peak oil or a related article to at least read all the articles linked from {{Peak oil}} carefully first, and follow their external links to understand the state of the subject and its controversies. (I happen to think the prominent peakniks are generally a little too dismissive of the work in renewable energy, not to mention that only Matthew Simmons seems to have something of a handle on the potential of telecommuting, but I share their conclusion that oil-dependent economies are almost certain to experience severe upheavals. People won't change their engrained habits until the pain becomes unbearable.) Amidst all the emotion, try to remember that nature doesn't care what we write on Wikipedia; deleting what might look like bad news here won't magically put more oil in the ground. However, Wikipedia should always strive to be as factual and neutral as possible. --Teratornis (talk) 19:01, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

I would not encourage a substantial edit of this article. It has had many, many reviews of professionals in the field and has met GA status. Please discuss major changes before making them. Kgrr (talk) 01:00, 1 April 2008 (UTC)

NPOV / Criticisms

I have been a main contributor to this article and have worked hard to achieve GA status on this article. Part of getting GA is to have an objective, bias free article. There used to be a fairly extensive section on criticisms of Peak oil. It dealt with cornucopians, on abiotic oil theory and CERA. It seems to have been systematically removed. None of it remails. I would like to revert that section back into the Criticsms section so that we can avert NPOV issues and edit wars. Please let me know how you feel Kgrr (talk) 15:48, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

I assume you mean this section. It looks like it never made it out of Hubbert peak theory when this article was split off from there a year ago. My only concern is that the criticisms are mostly that Campbell or Hubbert didn't get the date exactly right. That's mostly covered in the timing section of the article, as well as the Predicting the timing of peak oil article. The CERA report is integrated into the article (lead and timing sections) as well. I'm actually in favor of beefing up the sections that were integrated as well as integrating the current criticism section (though due consideration should be given to the notability of the sources), and perhaps spinning off a separate Criticisms of peak oil article. What are the main crits? So far I see:

1. the more oil costs, the more ways will be developed to get more oil
2. there's plenty of oil we haven't found yet
3. we'll fix out dependency by the time it's important
4. abiogenic hypothesis of petroleum

Am I missing anything?

No need to re-create nearly all of it, this whole section was deleted somewhere in the last four months while I was off working on other articles:

==Alternative views==

===Non-dramatic peak oil===

Not all non-'peakists' believe there will be endless abundance of oil. CERA, for example, instead believes that global production will eventually follow an “undulating plateau” for one or more decades before declining slowly. In 2005 the group had predicted that "petroleum supplies will be expanding faster than demand over the next five years."

Dr. R.C. Vierbuchen, Vice President, Caspian/Middle East Region, ExxonMobil Exploration Co. believes

"A peak in petroleum liquids production, resulting solely from resource limitations, is unlikely in the next 25 years. Predictions of an imminent peak [based on the methodology developed by Shell Oil Co. geologist M. King Hubbert] in 1956 do not adequately account for resource growth from application of new technology, knowledge and capability, which combine to increase recovery, open new producing areas and lower economic thresholds."

"Supplies from OPEC and non-OPEC countries, gas-related liquids and unconventional resources are growing. Furthermore, nations with the largest remaining resources produce under long-term restraints not envisioned in Hubbert’s method. The ultimate peak in petroleum production may result from factors other than resource limitations."

Similarly, some analysts believe that the rising oil prices will instigate a move toward alternative sources of fuel, and that this will take effect long before oil reserves are depleted. Some have argued that while OPEC ensures through its regulations that oil prices do not fall too low, it also shows concern that overly inflated prices will cause many countries to move toward alternative energy sources, for economic as well as political reasons. In 1990 Saudi Arabia in particular flooded the market to prevent prices from going to high. The recent rise in oil prices to nearly $100 per barrel in November of 2007 brings the price well above where analysts have speculated that this process could take place, although it is expected that this would happen over an extended period of time.

===Energy Information Administration and USGS 2000 reports===

The U.S. Energy Information Administration projects world consumption of oil to increase to 98.3 million barrels a day in 2015 and 118 million barrels a day in 2030. This represents more than a 25% increase in world oil production. A 2004 paper by the Energy Information Administration based on data collected in 2000 disagrees with Hubbert peak theory on several points:

• Explicitly incorporates demand into model as well as supply
• Does not assume pre/post-peak symmetry of production levels
• Models pre- and post-peak production with different functions (exponential growth and constant reserves-to-production ratio, respectively)
• Assumes reserve growth, including via technological advancement and exploitation of small reservoirs

The EIA estimates of future oil supply are countered by Sadad Al Husseini, retired VP Exploration of Aramco, who calls it a 'dangerous over-estimate'. Husseini also points out that population growth and the emergence of China and India means oil prices are now going to be structurally higher than they have been.

Colin Campbell argues that the 2000 USGS estimates is methodologically flawed study that has done incalculable damage by misleading international agencies and governments. Campbell dismisses the notion that the world can seamlessly move to more difficult and expensive sources of oil and gas when the need arises. He argues that oil is in profitable abundance or not there at all, due ultimately to the fact that it is a liquid concentrated by nature in a few places having the right geology. Campbell believes OPEC countries raised their reserves to get higher oil quotas and to avoid internal critique. He also points out that the USGS failed to extrapolate past discovery trends in the world’s mature basins.

===No Peak Oil===

Some commentors, such as economists Michael Lynch and Michael Moffat, believe that the Hubbert Peak theory is flawed and that there is no imminent peak in oil production; such views are sometimes referred to as "cornucopian" by believers in Hubbert Peak Theory. Lynch argues that production is determined by demand as well as geology, and that fluctuations in oil supply are due to political and economic effects in addition to the physical processes of exploration, discovery and production. Moffat contends that as prices increase, consumers will find alternatives to gasoline, arguing that changes in consumer patterns and the emergence of new technology driven by increases in the price of oil will prevent the oil supply from ever physically running out.

Abdullah S. Jum'ah President, Director and CEO of Aramco states that the world has adequate reserves of conventional and non conventional oil sources for more than a century..

OPEC has never acknowledged imminent Peak oil concerns.‹The template Talkfact is being considered for merging.›  In OPEC's 2007 annual book, which discusses issues such as future supply position, forecasted demand, and ultimate recoverable reserves (URR), the authors state that the conventional oil resource base is sufficient to satisfy demand increases over the projected period until 2030 at a price of $50-60 per barrel, increasing afterwards to account for inflation. It also states that, comparing the 5% confidence (P5) URR of 3300(sic) billion barrels from the 2000 USGS survey to what appears to be (there is no reference given) the 95% confidence (P95) URR of 1700(sic) billion barrels from the 1980 Rand corporation, production after 1980 has been only 1/3rd of reserve additions happening during the same period, in contrast with statements from Peak oil advocates. Four other surveys from 1980 give estimates of 2600, 2400, 2280, and 2015 billion barrels. Comparing the average of the five 1980 estimates (2219 billion barrels when using the actual Rand estimate of 1800 billion barrels) to P95 URR from the 2000 USGS survey (2272 billion barrels), production after 1980 has been over 10 times more than reserve additions.

===Abiogenesis===

Main article: Abiogenic petroleum origin

Biogenesis remains the overwhelmingly majority theory among petroleum geologists in the United States. Abiogenic theorists however, such as the late professor of astronomy Thomas Gold at Cornell University, assert that the sources of oil may not be “fossil fuels” in limited supply, but instead abiotic in nature. They theorize that if abiogenic petroleum sources are found to be abundant, it would mean Earth contains vast reserves of untapped petroleum. However, M. R. Mello and J.M. Moldowan counter that biomarkers in all the samples of all the oil and gas accumulations found up to now prove conclusively that oil comes from a biologic origin and that oil is generated from kerogen by pyrolysis.

So here is the list so far:

1. Non-dramatic peak oil - plateau and slow decline (CERA et al)
2. EIA & USGS2000 - we'll just produce more to meet demand
3. No peak oil - the more oil costs, the more ways will be developed to get more oil (Cornucopians)
4. There's plenty of oil we haven't found yet
5. We'll fix out dependency by the time it's important
6. abiogenic hypothesis of petroleum - oil is continually produced by the earth

4 and 5 have not been researched.

>>>---> The merger with peak timing had been *voted down* because it muddles the minority viewpoints. They must be preserved in order to remain fair and balanced.

Kgrr (talk) 22:36, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

I don't see where the merger got voted it on... it looks more like it just didn't get any discussion. I think the the distinctions over different views were made in the lead (Pessimistic vs. Optimistic) and soon the body followed that pattern. One could argue that calling the alternative views "alternative" weakens them ;) The biggest problem with the list just above is some of them are extremely similar arguments: EIA/USGS and the two that follow it seem to me to be essentially the same thing from different sources--or rather different people leaning on basically the same sources--while non-dramatic we'll fix our dependancy are about the same. A big problem is that currently the press and even the oil companies (minus most of OPEC) admit to some form of peak oil issue, meaning much of the older refs in this section may be out of step with current opinions. Thoughts? NJGW (talk) 23:49, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

Check the section

<nokiki>== Merging </nowiki>Peak_oil#Alternative_views with Peak_oil#Timing == No one came forward with reasons pro. I voted con. Therefore it was not done.Kgrr (talk) 01:29, 1 April 2008 (UTC)

"A big problem is that currently the press and even the oil companies (minus most of OPEC) admit to some form of peak oil issue" Yes, clearly the consensus viewpoint is that we have been in Peak oil since 2006. The EIA/USGS is way out of step with where the mainstream is now and so is CERA, the cornucopians, and abiotic theorists, etc. Consider that for every 9 barrels of oil that we use, they are only discovering 1 barrel. Clearly what is being found cannot meet the demand. Peak is when demand clearly exceeds new discoveries. This means the demand is being met by draining the known reserves faster than they are being replenished by new discoveries. The OPEC and the international oil companies are in the business of providing returns to their stockholders. If the stockholders knew that the supply was dwindling quickly, they would not be able to sell their stocks for a lot of money. This explains the EAI/USGS position as well.

To prevent POV, we need to let the facts speak for themselves. To fairly represent all the leading and minority views it is sometimes necessary to qualify the description of an opinion, or to present several formulations of this opinion and attribute them to specific groups. For example, we do need to mention the abiotic theory but do mention that *all* oil samples ever tested have been shown to have a plant origin. We do need to mention CERA's opinion, but that CERA has not been able to put money where their mouth is with the $100,000 bet. Etc. See Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view

Now how to organize this... NPOV says that the article should fairly represent all significant viewpoints that have been published by a reliable source, and should do so in proportion to the prominence of each. I'm biased about the consensus about peak oil. My Dad is a petroleum geologist. They are not looking for oil on land anymore. It's all been found. They are looking offshore. But the prospects are really not good and very expensive. Oil shales and tar sands are really not a solution since the cost of recovery depends a lot on the cost of energy which keeps going up.

Opinions? Kgrr (talk) 00:52, 1 April 2008 (UTC)

The discussion above is hard to follow (see my comments below). If you want my opinion, a proper treatment of peak oil skepticism might also document the "peak skepticism" phenomenon, if we can find any reliable sources to document this. At the risk of making an original observation, I will point out the obvious. Just as a peak in oil production occurs at some point as a result of geology, a peak in skepticism about peak oil also occurs, as a result of psychology. In the early days of oil discovery and extraction, supply seems limitless and almost everyone is optimistic. Unrestrained exponential growth promotes optimism. In the 1950s, the U.S. consumed an amount of oil equal to all the oil it had consumed in the decades prior; and again in the 1960s. During the heyday of exponential growth, most people thought M. King Hubbert was crazy. In the 1970s, the rate of increase in oil consumption slowed, U.S. domestic oil extraction peaked, and Hubbert gained some converts. However, in the 1980s and 1990s, world oil extraction increased, although not nearly as fast as it had before the 1970s, and optimism abounded as Julian Lincoln Simon and others made their bets and enjoyed twitting the resource pessimists. (This reminds me of the phenomenon in medicine when a terminally ill patient briefly regains strength just before dying.) Then came the 2000s when world oil extraction appears to have peaked, and oil underwent a steady run-up in price. Optimism among the experts also appears to be peaking - for example, anybody who believes oil is currently overpriced is free to short sell oil on a commodities exchange. How many peak oil skeptics are just now shorting oil? There is, of course, a huge disconnect between the experts who study the data vs. the general population, most of whom have not even heard of peak oil yet, or have only the vaguest notions of it. Most petroleum consumers seem to be trying to process the ongoing run-up in price in terms of optimistic 1960s assumptions, as evidenced by all the anger over higher fuel prices. Getting angry over a fuel price increase suggests the angry person believes the price should not be rising, which would imply disbelief in the reality of the peak in oil extraction. Contrast this with the emotional response to a catastrophe such as Hurricane Katrina - nobody got mad at the hurricane, they got mad at the failure of government to rescue citizens from their own lack of preparation. There was no skepticism about the fact that the hurricane had occurred. Thus I would suggest the order of peaking is:

• Oil discoveries peak -> Oil extraction peaks -> Disbelief peaks among experts -> Disbelief peaks among nonexperts

Since experts function closer to reality than nonexperts in almost every field of nonfiction where expertise exists, we can predict that disbelief among the experts will probably peak at a time very close to the peak in oil extraction. Of course if the experts were competent, their disbelief should have peaked long before the peak in oil extraction. --Teratornis (talk) 16:25, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

Please blockquote when quoting large amounts of text

The above discussion is hard to follow, because the large amounts of quoted text intermingle with the later comments, making it hard to understand who is making what point, and in response to what. When quoting large amounts of article text, please place it inside blockquote or div tags with a background color to distinguish it from the fresh text that you are typing, like this:

Here is some blockquoted text.

Then it will be easier for others to read the discussion and formulate opinions about it. --Teratornis (talk) 16:25, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

Units

We had agreed early on that units would be barrels of oil instead of cubic meters of oil. Why are changing the article mixing up units rather than having them follow the consensus view? We had a huge discussion to arrive at the consensus, now people are going through the article without discussion making wholesale changes. I request a new discussion on Units. Let's settle this issue and straighten out the mess. Kgrr (talk) 22:48, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

Here is my opening suggestion:

Initially when the article was written, we had decided on Imperial units. But you are welcome to add the metric translation to all of them if you do it right.

Here are the standard industry units and abbreviations we had decided upon:

1 bbl = 1 barrel 1 Mbbl = 1,000 barrels 1 MMbbl = 1,000,000 barrels

(These Imperial measures are a bit arcane. The M in this case is Mil for thousand, not Mega as in the metric system)

The metric standard industry units and abbreviations are:

1 m³ = 1,000 liters 1,000 m³ = 1,000,000 liters = 1 ML 1,000,000 m³ = 1 GL

Instead of:

"Demand will hit 118,000,000 barrels (18,800,000 m³) per day (bpd) from today's existing 86,000,000 barrels (13,700,000 m³), driven in large part by the transportation sector."

Can we please write this concisely as such? This way, we should be able to quote the article exactly and also translate into metric units with the same number of significant digits. I really don't want to see long strings of zeroes that I need to count in order to understand the quantity.

"Demand will hit 118 MMbbl (18.8 GL) per day from today's existing 86 MMbbl (13.7 GL) per day, driven in large part by the transportation sector."

Please see Barrel (unit)

Comments please. Kgrr (talk) 00:07, 1 April 2008 (UTC)

Some links in WP:EIW#Units might be relevant. The general guideline seems to be WP:UNITS. We might use the {{Convert}} template (or a variant) to standardize the presentation and make everybody happy, without requiring a ton (or tonne) of tedious manual unit conversions. --Teratornis (talk) 06:25, 1 April 2008 (UTC)

Teratornis, tons/tonnes of Thanks! I don't have a problem with both Imperial and Metric measures. After all, Wikipedia is an international encyclopedia. The problem I have is the large string of zeroes with the current presentation. It makes it very difficult to read. We need to use units that are in the correct range. If the template does not work for us, we can certainly create a template that converts MMbbl to GL or Mbbl to ML for example. Also, we should make sure that the dangling per day or per year is properly placed after the measure.Kgrr (talk) 14:19, 1 April 2008 (UTC)

Just looked on here, and are the conversions correct? In "Production" section, the following "85.24 million barrels per day (135,520 m³/d)" and the same conversion follows throughout. this would be 0.00159 m3 per barrel. Seems it should be 13.5 million m3. Have I missed something? The reason I looked on here was to get a conversion from barrels to m3, and it threw me off a bit.Stainless316 (talk) 17:11, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

There definately seems to be a mix up. In the Demand for oil (the first section aftre the lead), we get "Demand will hit 118 million barrels per day (188,000 m³/d) from 2006's 86 million barrels (13,700,000 m³)" which seems to be two different conversions in the same sentence. Can I confirm that the true conversion is multiply barrels by 0.159 to get m3? I don't mind going throught he article to give consistency, but I am not an expert, so confirmation that I have got the right conversion would be good before I made any changes.Stainless316 (talk) 11:23, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Back again. Having made a couple of small edits, i have now noticed that the conversions are from a template. it looks to me that the barrel / day to m3 is different from barrel to m3 by a factor of 100. Am I missing a proper reason for this? if not, then the template needs fixing for barrels per day, I think. I am not familiar with templates.Stainless316 (talk) 12:50, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Those that need to know are aware, and it will be fixed. Stainless316 (talk) 09:47, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

References

I meticulously spent a lot of time creating references in the Harvard style. Many new references have been added in the old form and don't show up on the reflist properly. This needs to be corrected. Can someone step up to the plate and work on this please? Kgrr (talk) 23:05, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

What I am expecting here is to follow this reference style:

<ref>{{cite journal | quotes = | author = last, first | date = 2008-03-31 | year = | month = | title = A sample article title | journal = A sample journal title | volume = 1 | issue = 2 | pages = pp. 1092-1095 | publisher = Big Publishing House | location = New York | issn = 1234578432 | pmid = | doi = 10.4320432 | bibcode = | oclc = | id = | url = http://www.journal.com/issue1232341234.html | language = English | format = | accessdate = 2008-04-01 | laysummary = | laysource = | laydate = | quote = }}</ref>

<ref>{{cite web |url= http://www.publisher.com/123432.htm |title= This is the title |accessdate= 2008-04-01 |accessdaymonth= |accessmonthday= |accessyear= |author= Last, First |last= |first= |authorlink= |coauthors= |date= 2008-01-1 |year= |month= |format= |work= |publisher= Name of the publisher |pages= |language= English |doi= |archiveurl= |archivedate= |quote= }}</ref>

Kgrr (talk) 00:20, 1 April 2008 (UTC)

If you were attempting to format your examples like this:

<ref>{{cite journal
 | quotes = 
 | author = last, first
 | date = 2008-03-31
 | year = 
 | month = 
 | title = A sample article title
 | journal = A sample journal title
 | volume = 1
 | issue = 2
 | pages = pp. 1092-1095
 | publisher = Big Publishing House
 | location = New York
 | issn = 1234578432
 | pmid = 
 | doi = 10.4320432
 | bibcode = 
 | oclc =
 | id = 
 | url = http://www.journal.com/issue1232341234.html
 | language = English
 | format = 
 | accessdate = 2008-04-01
 | laysummary = 
 | laysource = 
 | laydate = 
 | quote = 
}}</ref>

the way to make that happen is to indent the first line of the example by one space. See Help:Wikitext examples#Just show what I typed. Also, the three basic help/guideline pages for footnotes are: WP:CITE, WP:CITET, and WP:FOOT. Everybody who adds a reference to an article should read those pages. --Teratornis (talk) 00:39, 19 April 2008 (UTC)

Also see WP:EIW#Citetools for some tools to make citations like the above much easier to generate. I installed WPCITE, and it's great. --Teratornis (talk) 05:48, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

Meaningless Contextless statistics

While I perceive this to be an excellent article, and would like to praise all contributors, a couple of incompletely stated statistics seem to render them meaningless: e.g.- “World demand for oil is set to increase 37% by 2030” – What does this mean… from what base year, date or value, is it from 1880 a.d. or date of writing the article (if so, what year was it written) or current day. “World crude oil demand has grown at around 2 percent in recent years” – What does that mean… Is the 2% growth per annum?, per quarter?, over a five year period? “Demand will hit 118 million barrels per day (188,000 m³/d) from today's existing 86 million barrels” When was today?... or is this statistic updated on a daily basis?

I’m not sure if this is isolated to this paragraph, but I will check through the rest when I can. Otherwise, excellent work —Preceding unsigned comment added by Wiremu 67 (talk • contribs) 03:09, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

Luckily all the answers were in the sources. I took a few minutes and sorted it out. NJGW (talk) 14:45, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

The relevant guideline is WP:DATED. When the sources do not define the dates, we can resort to marking sections with the {{uncleardate}} template. This problem is common because many of our sources are news articles with expressions that date quickly ("In recent months", "Over the next 30 years", etc.). Wikipedia editors must learn to nail down the dates as they rewrite source material into encyclopedic form. This is, by the way, one reason why Wikipedia is growing in popularity. A Wikipedia article is often better than a search of the wider Web on a topic because the Web is full of pages with unclear dates. Lots of people write news articles that make sense when they are new, but years later the articles are still online, and the reader has to figure out when an article appeared and then mentally translate all the dated material. --Teratornis (talk) 17:03, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

Removed possible weasel words

I removed from "Timing of peak oil" the sentence "Not all non-peak-oilists believe there is an endless abundance of oil."

My reason is as follows: Saying that "not all" of a group adhere to a particular belief implies that _some_ in that group _do_ adhere to that belief.

There is no one who believes an endless abdundance of oil exists. To believe this would be to have a magical or nonsensical view of the universe. Hence, the opening sentence of that section seemed to be establishing a straw man, paper tiger, or some such creature.

Ordinary Person (talk) 08:40, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

Abiogenic petroleum origin supporters, such as Alex Jones (radio) [3] and others. Also, see Cornucopian. NJGW (talk) 13:18, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

A cornucopian seems to believe commodity shortages stimulate greater human creativity, eventually reducing the price of the formerly scarce commodity to lower than it was before the shortage, either as a result of technological advances increasing the supply of the commodity, and/or the discovery or invention of substitute goods which reduce the demand for the commodity, such that the shortage ends and the price falls. History shows examples where this occurred (e.g., kerosene replacing whale oil) as well as counterexamples where substitute goods did not magically materialize in time to prevent catastrophic die-off (e.g., Easter Island). Thus a cornucopian could admit that petroleum is finite, but consider that irrelevant. I don't think cornucopians call themselves cornucopians; the word is probably more an exonymic pejorative. I'm sad that Julian Simon (leading exponent of cornucopianism) died a few years before the Oil price increases since 2003, not to mention the coming petrocollapse should it occur. It would be interesting to read his last optimistic dispatch just before the lights go out for good. --Teratornis (talk) 00:34, 19 April 2008 (UTC)

Technically, abiogenic origin supporters do not believe in endless abundance, since abiogenic production still relies on the finite energy source of nuclear decay in the planet's core. Therefore, Ordinary Person is correct. ThVa (talk) 10:11, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

That may be, but it is used to argue against the existence of Peak oil (eg Stanley Monteith and Alex Jones). NJGW (talk) 01:10, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

Graphs

How about a chart showing past and projected production/consumption and discovery on the same graph? Richard001 (talk) 08:13, 20 April 2008 (UTC)

You're possibly thinking of a chart like the one that appears 1 min 26 sec into the following video, under the caption "It's Simple Really":

• Alan Kohler on Oil on YouTube

I agree that would be an excellent chart, and it could also superimpose the price of oil. So will you create it? --Teratornis (talk) 05:53, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

Weak quote

This quote is in paragraph 2: "a growing number of oil-industry chieftains are endorsing an idea long deemed fringe: The world is approaching a practical limit to the number of barrels of crude oil that can be pumped every day."

We need a better quote for the intro. Problems:

• The linked source is a peak oil advocacy website that's quoting the Wall Street Journal; it's secondhand.
• The sources that the WSJ attribute this attitude toward are not named; they are "two senior industry officials".
• Weasel term: "a growing number"? What is the number and how much is it growing?
• The quote talks about hitting a limit but doesn't talk about any subsequent decline. True, this would be a peak oil scenario, but I personally think since there's so much attention focused on this subsequent decline, the quote in the intro should discuss it.

Sorry to complain instead of just finding a better quote but this isn't my area of expertise and I'm short on time currently. Tempshill (talk) 16:02, 21 April 2008 (UTC)

Yup. It's weak. "Secondhand" isn't a problem (we want to cite secondary sources), but using an advocacy site is, especially absent a balancing POV. Weasel is definitely a problem. In fact there's no real need for a quote in the WP:LEAD. It should be rewritten. Care to propose a new version here? LeadSongDog (talk) 19:13, 21 April 2008 (UTC)

Here is a video from Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Catalyst (TV program) series that may be a possible source, or give a clue about where we might find a possible source:

• Peak Oil (part 1) on YouTube
• Peak Oil (part 2) on YouTube

The video features interviews with several oil industry figures, including Jeremy Leggett and Eric Streitberg (Managing Directory, ARC Energy). At 4 minutes into part 2, Streitberg mentions asking the attendees at the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Conference how many believe peak oil had arrived. 50% of the audience raised a hand. "These are practicing petroleum industry professionals." That was in 2005, when oil was trading for less than half the current price. Also see my additions to Oil price increases since 2003#Forecasted prices in which blue-chip investment banks Barclays Capital and Goldman Sachs are revising their oil price projections upward because demand continues to grow while supply remains flat at best. In particular, "non-OPEC supply ... continues to under-perform dramatically relative to consensus expectations." Simultaneously, OPEC "refuses" to increase its output, despite record high prices, leading some to speculate that OPEC cannot increase its output, which is to say, OPEC may be collectively at or near peak. According to Matthew Simmons, once it becomes clear that OPEC has peaked, there will no longer be any doubt that the world has peaked. --Teratornis (talk) 06:44, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

Agriculture

I removed the following statement from the document and some users have taken exception to that so I have started a discussion here :

Additionally, application of agricultural biotechnology including transgenic plants holds great promise for maintaining or increasing yields while requiring fewer fossil fuel derived inputs than conventional crops.

Not only does the document not reflect the language used in the article, but there are plenty of documents around that do not agree with it. I think that a clear look at the source and supports of each piece of documentation needs to be looked at. I think that the above is definitly not a clear cut "fact" that can be present. The jury is certainly still out as to whether GMOs are actually a way to mitigate peak oil. Primarily because they support mono-cultures which forces huge forces larger amounts of fuel to be used on transportation. Amongst other reasons.

Bottom line, seems to me that the above statement is controversal and as such does not belong on Wikipedia untill verified.

Sources to come.

Paullb (talk) 10:13, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

I had already removed the colourful wording of "great promise" to which you objected on your talk page and have further clarified the statement by inclusion of the word some which now reads thusly:

Additionally, some applications of agricultural biotechnology including transgenic plants can allow for maintaining or increasing yields while requiring fewer fossil fuel derived inputs than conventional crops.

Furthermore nowhere does wikipedia imply that "controversal" information is to be excluded until all sources in the world are unanimous in their support of the information. It is appropriate to add contrary sourced information but it is not appropriate to remove sourced information simply because you find other sources that conflict with it.Zebulin (talk) 10:50, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Automobile Mileage Reporting

While not a direct edit of the Peak Oil page, the Wikiproject Automobile discussion page is having a discussion about whether or not to include fuel economy as part of the Automotive Infobox. If interested, please share your opinion. 198.151.13.8 (talk) 18:17, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

Brazil

It seems to me like Peak Oil is about as real as the North American Union. The huge find made in Brazil makes for a strong argument against peak oil. Also, the real reason for any shortage of oil is not decreased supply, but increased demand from places like China and India. This article seems to make it out to be a proven fact, rather than the theory/hypothsis that it really is.

Anyway, the big find in Brazil should be included into a counter-argument inside the article. Contralya (talk) —Preceding comment was added at 22:26, 6 May 2008 (UTC)

Do you mean this? That's only 12 billion barrels, even smaller than Jack (see first section of this page). We use about 87 million each day, so even if they somehow get ALL the oil out of it (not possible with today's technology), that's still only about 137 days of oil (assuming car sales in China and India stop yesterday), and it won't even ramp up to full production until 2020. NJGW (talk) 03:23, 7 May 2008 (UTC)

That is a good point. Though what I am talking about is how they make new oil finds and start drilling in new places all of the time and also, about how the increase in demand leading to shortage, rather than decrease in supply. Contralya (talk) 17:12, 7 May 2008 (UTC)

In the article it's explained that oil discoveries peaked a long time ago, and production per year has passed discoveries per year in 1980. New discoveries are factored into most calculations of Peak oil. Also, you have a point that higher demand doesn't lower supply, but keep in mind that as demand is rising every day, supply isn't (according to the average latest supply numbers from the last few years). Therefore, rising demand exacerbates the effects of steady or falling supply... the two are pretty intimately connected precisely because we are at or near the peak (before that on the curve and it wouldn't matter as much). NJGW (talk) 17:31, 7 May 2008 (UTC)

The other problem with new finds like Jack 2 is that they are in more difficult locations, such as deep underwater, or in the Arctic, etc. Difficult locations mean they take longer to develop. By the time Jack 2 is delivering oil, the older producing fields will have declined that much more. There just aren't enough new discoveries in the pipe to make up for declines in existing fields. And note that demand was always part of Hubbert's original theory, since there is no significant storage of oil after it comes out of the ground. The model assumes (or, more accurately, observed) that during the initial phase of exponentially increasing oil extraction, consumers will demand all the oil that is pumped. And they do. Demand for oil tends to grow exponentially as long as the price is low enough - which is another way of saying that whatever we are using in a given year, we want to use even more the next year. Thus as the rate of oil extraction reaches its peak, the price must rise as necessary to choke off the exponential growth in demand, and keep consumption matched closely with extraction. The rate of oil extraction levels off at some point and begins to decline because all the easy oil gets pumped first. As we get to progressively more difficult oil, it just doesn't come out of the ground as quickly, no matter what we do. Getting oil from the ground is not like opening a spigot on a tank, except in the early days when oil is easy to get, like it was at Spindletop. --Teratornis (talk) 06:59, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

I'm sorry but i fail to see why this find could be used as an argument against peak oil. It can only change its date but can't prevent it from happening because it doesn't change the fact that oil is a finite ressource. 134.157.119.4 (talk) 07:57, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

Furthermore even if oil were an infinite resource, peak oil would still be observed so long as total production continued to steadily decline while total demand continued to increase. Peak oil just means that production 'peaks' in spite of demand not having 'peaked'.Zebulin (talk) 08:09, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

Even a renewable resource can "peak" if it renews at a finite rate. This leads to the phenomenon of "peak water," in which people pump "fossil water" out of aquifers faster than it recharges from rainfall. Because the aquifer built up some storage over thousands of years, people can pump water from it at an unsustainable rate. At some point the pumping rate must decline to match the recharge rate. The aquifer has essentially unlimited production capacity over geologic time, but the maximum sustainable production rate equals the recharge rate, which may be far less than the short-term drawdown rate when people first begin to exploit it. --Teratornis (talk) 16:11, 19 May 2008 (UTC)

Timing of Peak Oil

I just edited this section.

• Old: All of these, however, indicate a peak of oil production, however, will happen at some time, for the resource is unrenewable and will eventually run out.
• New: All of these predictions indicate peak oil production will happen.

Originally, I was just going to remove the redundant "however," but the statement itself was inaccurate. Oil is renewable, just not fast. Our rate of consumption outstrips the rate of new oil forming. This makes it functionally non-renewable, but not factually. --McC (talk) 15:40, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

Free oil

In the macroeconomic sense, we still treat oil as free: demand remains largely price-insensitive. At present pricing a barrel of oil at market is about two days pay for a minimum-wage worker in a G8 economy. This really hasn't changed much for many years. It would be instructive to compare demand per person across or within different economies for signs of the retail gas price (in minimum-wage days) that changes consumption. LeadSongDog (talk) 15:42, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

Energy Non-Crisis

Has anyone checked this guy out? Does anyone know if he's a fringe madman or if there's any legitimacy? It may warrant inclusion if under nothing else than, "Conspiracy Theory".--Loodog (talk) 03:13, 11 May 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, someone added it as a link two weeks ago. At first I edited the attribution, but after I watched the video and looked up some of his background information I took it out. First, it's all hearsay from a non-oil person, so major grain of salt. But even more damning is the fact that his whole underlying theory of why the US won't release the decades of oil that is supposedly hidden under Alaska's north shore is the middle east owns all our national debt, so we have to keep them happy. Actually that's totally false[4]. In fact, the US owns half it's own debt (not really sure how that works), followed by Japan, China, the UK, Brazil, and THEN "oil exporters" (even though they seem to have gone on a buying spree the last 9-12 months, and even so own about 1/4 what either Japan or China own). Third, he claims this gives them some sort of domain over us, when in fact it just means they have major interest in the dollar staying strong (so their investment stays valuable). In fact, even if they owned all our debt, all we would have to do is print more money to buy it back!

No, Mr. Williams is proud to tell you he's good friends with the fringe captain, Dr. Stanley Monteith[5] (who believes in very fast abiogenesis of oil, and that a global cabal of some sort controls each and every government, and there isn't a head of state in the world who isn't a low level pawn in their game). But boy doesn't he spin a good yarn? Gets you gripping your seat for the whole 75 minutes, just waiting for him to actually say something that ties it all together... something you could actually check up on! Of course he HAS to wait 'til the very end to drop the bomb, because if you actually bother looking it up everything he said before it just unravels... NJGW (talk) 04:37, 11 May 2008 (UTC)

What "the US owns half its own debt" means is that large numbers of Americans have obligated their children to pay debt service in the form of taxes to the children of the tiny minority of Americans who have enough wealth to hold significant amounts in treasury bonds. Wealth in the U.S. follows a Pareto distribution, which means the top 1% of U.S. citizens by wealth hold a huge fraction of the total wealth. They lend lots of it to the U.S. government, so the majority of U.S. taxpayers may consume a greater value in public goods than they pay for with their taxes. In return, these taxpayers agree to obligate future taxpayers to pay service on the debt. Since lots of that debt will remain outstanding for decades, effectively that means middle and low-income taxpayers are selling their children into a kind of indentured servitude to whoever inherits all those T-bills. It seems unlikely that a society can remain politically stable when a huge majority of some future generation realizes they were born with an obligation to pay taxes to some minority of their age cohort. (Why would your kids want to pay taxes to Paris Hilton's kids?) A populist future government might choose to cancel the debt, or perhaps increase the estate tax to prevent the propagation of enormous debt legacies. But of course any attempt to renege on obligations could create all sorts of problems such as wrecking the credit rating of the U.S. government which allows it to borrow at low rates currently. I'm not an expert on these issues but I think that's basically how government debt works - it's basically a way for poorer people to consume some of the rich people's wealth in exchange for the promise that someone will pay it back later. --Teratornis (talk) 07:03, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

I might add that one rarely hears it spelled out that way, as if there is some kind of deliberate or accidental conspiracy to keep most of the poor taxpayers in the dark about what they are doing to their kids. To see which side you are on, compare the per capita national debt to your treasury bond portfolio. If you hold more than your per capita share of the debt, then other taxpayers are promising they or their children will pay you or your children (or your estate, or whoever gets your t-bills) back, with interest. --Teratornis (talk) 07:10, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

Lindsay Williams is a "conservative Baptist minister." I wonder if he believes all the oil is 6000 years old? --Teratornis (talk) 07:21, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

Reference Book Catalog, Non-Verifiable Sources

This article has an almost obscene number of promotional book references (almost the entire authorship by certain peak-promoting individuals), promotional movies, and all sorts of things; it comes across as an attempt to promote the theory rather than reference individual points. This is unencyclopedic, unprofessional, and full of clutter. And, of course, a lot of the references don't come even close to meeting WP:V. I went bold and got rid of the "book and movie catalogs", and trimmed the articles down to only those from WP:V sources with these changes, but they were RV'ed. Thoughts? -- Rei (talk) 03:19, 17 May 2008 (UTC)

To put it another way: is the further reading section of the article on Mormonism full of books and movies trying to convince people that it's the One True Faith (because there sure are a lot)? Of course not; it wouldn't be encyclopedic. Why shouldn't we have the same standard here? -- Rei (talk) 03:42, 17 May 2008 (UTC)

I'd be interested in your impressions of this: Scientology bibliography. One difference between peak oil and Mormonism is that Mormonism explicitly denies the need for evidence of its faith claims, whereas Hubbert peak theory is a scientific theory, and as such it is entirely testable and falsifiable. For example, the Book of Mormon makes many claims about the prehistory of Mesoamerica for which no archeological evidence exists, and for which the discovery of evidence by now would seem likely, but Mormons believe the claims anyway. In contrast, we know for a fact that U.S. oil production peaked around 1970. We also know that in 1956, M. King Hubbert predicted U.S. oil production would peak sometime between 1965 and 1970. Hubbert peak theory models the oil production trajectories of individual countries reasonably well. The world is just a collection of countries, so we would expect Hubbert peak theory to have some predictive value for all countries in the aggregate. Virtually all oil industry professionals agree that petroleum is a finite resource, it is nonrenewable on the human time scale for all practical purposes, and therefore world petroleum production must eventually reach a peak and then decline. Almost everyone agrees the peak will be sometime in 20xx. The only serious debates are about the value of xx, and about whether peak oil will be a serious problem when it does occur. "Early peakers" claim the peak has already occurred or is soon to occur, and they tend to make dire predictions about the general lack of preparedness. (It's hard to argue that humanity is ready right now for any substantial decline in oil production, but if you can find a reliable source which presents such arguments, the article could mention them.) At the other end, organizations like the Energy Information Administration and International Energy Agency have been projecting the peak to occur later (in the 2030-2070 range). So we have this odd situation in which almost everyone believes in "peak oil," but only the people who think it's a problem are considered "peak oil proponents." (The remarkable Oil price increases since 2003 have confounded the resource optimists, so they are now revising their projections of future oil production, most likely downward. As Richard Nixon once famously said, "We are all Keynesians now", and perhaps it won't be long before someone equally important says the same thing about peak oil.) There are a few abiotic oil fringe theorists who believe oil continuously re-forms inside the Earth, and therefore oil production need never decline, but the article already accounts for them. In other words, almost everybody whose beliefs are connected with physical reality believes in peak oil; the only question is whether it's a problem for now or for later. Someone who believes in peak oil 30 years from now may be less likely to write a book telling people not to worry, although Bjørn Lomborg and a few others have done just that. In other words, it's hard to find many reliable sources that refute what you call "promotional" books based on actual facts (especially while the actual facts of oil prices are screaming "scarcity"). More typically, skepticism about an early peak in oil production involves large elements of wishful thinking or simple ignorance, or appeal to nostrums such as the magic of the market or slogans such as "The Stone Age did not end for lack of stones." The general media reaction to the current oil price increase has bordered on incredulity, with people casting about for scapegoats such as commodity speculation or inadequate investment.

In any case, I agree that Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information, and we must repect the holy grail of neutrality, especially when it hurts, so we should cite our sources instead of merely listing them as a bibliography. However, Wikipedia has many articles which list books (Lists of books), writers (Lists of writers), and films (Lists of films). Perhaps someone could start new articles:

• List of books about peak oil
• List of peak oil writers (see: User:Americanus/Peak Oil People for a start)
• List of films about peak oil

and then attempt to fend off the deletionists. People who want to raise awareness of peak oil (waves hand) could use (or start) another wiki (not connected with the Wikimedia Foundation) to compile bibliographies. We can then link to one or more external peak oil bibliographies on Wikipedia:List of bibliographies. Another option is to develop bibliographies on user subpages, to support research for further improving the peak oil articles. Editors benefit when they have ready access to source material, so we don't all have to redundantly search for it. We have the {{Peak oil}} navigation template to list any books and movies relating to peak oil which satisfy WP:N, so there is no need to separately list external links to these titles. Any book or movie which is not notable enough for its own article here probably does not deserve separate mention in the main Peak oil article, except as a citation (and subject to the normal challenge). --Teratornis (talk) 20:17, 8 June 2008 (UTC)

WP:OR

Arguing against the USGS report by piecing arguments together from other sources without a reference is a textbook violation of WP:OR, so stop RV'ing. Secondly, the earlier and later studies are both using the EUR rating -- the *mean*.

This is a textbook case. You can't argue against a WP:V reference without another WP:V reference that explicitly makes that same argument. -- Rei (talk) 06:21, 17 May 2008 (UTC)

I have removed the OR that said that understandings of oil reserves have been rising. NJGW (talk) 02:50, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

Is It Really Peak Oil Now?

Not trying to stir up bickering debate but:

1) is there yet scientific consensus about whether oil is peaking or not? What about supposed huge new reserves?

Iraq

Brazil

Arctic

Montana and North Dakota and

2) under the subheading "Energy Information Administration and USGS 2000 reports" it says "The U.S. Energy Information Administration projects world consumption of oil to increase to 98.3 million barrels per day (15.63×106 m3/d) in 2015 and 118 million barrels per day (18.8×106 m3/d) in 2030.[90] This represents more than a 25% increase in world oil production". Was that last word supposed to be "consumption" instead of "production" since that's what the paragraph was talking about? Or is is just worded badly? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 4.246.200.37 (talk) 17:38, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

Well, you should start by reading the discussions of this very topic on this talk page and the talk:petroleum page. The huge reserves you refer to are not fully recoverable with current technology (2-3 billion barrels, or less than a month's worth in the case of North Dakota), and because of the technical difficulties involved in many cases will take billions of dollars and up-front investment and at least 10 years to produce anything at all. It's important to look at the p90 or p95 EUR (90 or 95% confidence of total recoverable reserves) instead of the often quoted p5 or p10 (which is what you see in the news).

I have corrected the sentence you mentioned in the USGS section. I hope this is clearer language. NJGW (talk) 01:54, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

Thanks NJGW. I am familiar with Peak Oil but it seems that within the past few years or so I'm suddenly hearing of these new, large discoveries and I have to wonder how it changes the debate. I'm no expert on the subject but I've felt that while warnings are appropriate, definite predictions of an emminent peaking seemed somewhat premature, especially if the experts don't all agree and if they are still finding more. I tend to think that smug predictions can come back to bite one on the A-s. Of course physics dictates that we will run out at some point (if we don't find alternatives) and whether or not we have Peak Oil sooner rather than later we should clearly be weaning ourselves off the stuff ASAP. It's damaging in so many ways (wars, plastic pollution, lot's of health effects, global warming etc.) That much there is no debate on. It's unconscionable that we have not moved wholesale into alternatives by now. But I guess big energy wouldn't want that.4.246.202.26 (talk) 06:45, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

It's instructive to look at the oil extraction history of the U.S., which peaked in 1970 at 9.6 million bbl/day, and declined to 5.1 million bbl/day by 2006. There were several large oil discoveries after the peak which put some bumps on the decline curve. Without those discoveries, the decline would have been much steeper - the U.S. would have nearly exhausted its petroleum reserves. Since oil exploration and extraction occurred earlier in the U.S. than in much of the rest of the world, U.S. oil extraction history might predict how oil extraction will play out in the world as a whole. There is no guarantee of this, but it's all we've got. Therefore, we note:

• When the U.S. was 38 36 years past its peak, domestic oil production was still hanging tough at a bit more than 53% of peak level in 2006.
• However, domestic oil consumption approximately doubled during that time, with the difference made up with skyrocketing imports.

If the U.S. history predicts the future of world oil extraction (and this might be optimistic for various reasons, such as the wider use today of enhanced recovery technology which has the effect of maintaining peak production longer from large fields and then creating steeper drop-offs), we can expect that even 30-40 years after the world peaks, the world might still be extracting an absolutely large amount of oil, but this might be only a quarter or less of the amount of petroleum the world population would like to be burning by then. Try to imagine what it will take to destroy 75% of the demand for petroleum over the next several decades. That's the scale of the problem. --Teratornis (talk) 16:55, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

Allow me a slight paranoia. Since W & Co. have been in office there have been some disturbing but coincidental tragedies and other bad news that seem to result in neo-con policies that turn out to be just what they wanted all along. 9/11 resulted in an invasion of Iraq which we now know was what they planned even before that day [6][7]. In this case hard line conservatives have tried just about every trick in the book to obtain drilling in ANWR, National Parks and offshore but have been consistantly stymied by environmentalists and the general populace. Now that W has just months left in his reign suddenly oil prices are shooting up (it does seem rather sudden, and apparently the price of gas has been manipulated in the recent past with the help of the Sauds [8][9]). Predictably Bush and the neo-cons are using the present price hikes as an excuse to demand that drilling [10][11]. A false Peak Oil would benefit the oil companies. Now they can charge 2 to 3 or more times what they charged just a few years ago for the very same quantity of gas and blame it on Peak Oil. Another example is the current world food price crisis which seemed to come out from nowhere. Europe has steadfastly refused GMOs despite the fact that the US has been trying for years to ram it down their throats. But now with this sudden crisis they are being almost forced to accept it [12]. It's the suddeness and timing of these events that has got me suspecious. Brother, can you spare a dime? 4.246.200.43 (talk) 04:19, 22 May 2008 (UTC)

"There’s a few hedge fund managers out there who are masters at knowing how to exploit the peak [oil] theories and hot buttons of supply and demand and by making bold predictions of shocking price advancements to come, they only add more fuel to the bullish fire in a sort of self fulfilling prophecy." — National Gas Week, Sept. 5, 2005 as reprinted in the US Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations’ report, "The Role of Market Speculation in Rising Oil and Gas Prices," June 27, 2006. More at [13]. I get the sneaking feeling that those secret meetings that Cheney had with all those oil execs at the beginning of W's reign which the WH has steadfastly refused to reveal would be ... interesting. "It would be interesting for Congress to subpoena the records of the futures positions of Goldman Sachs and a handful of other major energy futures players to see if they are invested to gain from a further rise in oil to $200 or not.... Oil speculator T. Boone Pickens has reportedly raked in a huge profit on oil futures and argues, conveniently that the world is on the cusp of Peak Oil. So does the Houston investment banker and friend of Dick Cheney, Matt Simmons" [14]. 4.246.200.203 (talk) 17:02, 22 May 2008 (UTC)

More: "No supply crisis justifies the way the world's oil is being priced today. .... The major problem faced by Big Oil is not finding replacement oil but keeping the lid on world oil finds in order to maintain present exorbitant prices.... The refiners today are clearly trying to draw down gasoline inventories to bid gasoline prices up" [15]. Again, I'm not claiming that the current crisis is not Peak Oil related, but that it's the suddeness and timing of these events that has got me suspecious. "Thursday, light, sweet crude futures breached $135 a barrel, more than double the price a year ago" [16]. If anything, if it is manipulation this is further strong argument for why we should be weaning ourselves off this black death. I wouldn't put it past these guys, would you? Being held hostage by the sharks in Big Energy, which has shown nothing but disdain for environmental protection, and have consistantly rewarded themselves with the fattist of salaries and bonuses while little old ladies and struggling single moms try to pay exploding costs to heat their homes is quite enough reason. We need de-centralized renewable alternative energy NOW! 4.246.203.6 (talk) 16:38, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

Well, this is quite a debate. I think the basic question was:

1) "is oil is peaking or not?" The answer I could offer, based on 35 years experience in the oil industry, is "Nobody knows." However, many people are getting darn suspicious that it might be. To cover the specific instances given:

• Iraq - Nobody actually knows how much oil is under those western deserts, but they can make assumptions. Nobody is going to drill any wells while people are shooting rocket-propelled grenades at them, so it may be a while before we find out for sure.
• Brazil - It's a nice time to be a Brazilian. You have decades of guaranteed employment to come while they spend hundreds of billions of American dollars proving up those resources. It's less nice if you are an American who may or may not be able to buy some of that oil in decade or so.
• Arctic - I once worked for a company that ran a fleet of 23 ships in the Arctic. They drilled a lot of wells and found a bit of oil. Not enough to be worth producing, so they abandoned all the wells and wrote off the costs. Maybe somebody else will be more lucky this time. The Arctic, by the way, is gas prone, not oil prone.
• Montana and North Dakota - Don't forget Saskatchewan, too. Saskatchewan is now officially rich, Montana and North Dakota may become so, too. The Bakken formation may produce a large amount of oil over a very long period of time, possible raising the U.S. decline curve to the point where the difference is actually visible to the naked eye. But not much more than that.

2) Energy Information Administration and USGS reports. These organizations have always been wrong before (notably about the U.S. oil peak) Why would anyone expect them to be start being right now? RockyMtnGuy (talk) 19:03, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

Well Congress ought to be investigating and if it turns out that Big Oil is manipulating the prices for its benefit I would suggest an immediate two prong response, 1) Jail those responsible and 2) do a Venezula and nationalize oil, then set the price fairly. 4.246.206.176 (talk) 12:16, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

You're possibly not aware that over 80% of the world's oil reserves are already under the control of state-owned oil companies. Not many of them are friendly to the U.S., Petroleos de Venezuela being a case in point. The largest privately owned oil company, Exxon Mobile, has less than 1/30 of the reserves of Saudi Aramco, the biggest oil company of all. Second and third by reserves are the National Iranian Oil Company and the Iraq National Oil Company. Second and third by production are Petroleos Mexicanos and Petroleos de Venezuela. As it happens, Congress has recently passed a bill allowing people to sue members of OPEC for creating an oil monopoly. Of course, OPEC is an oil monopoly, but I don't think that suing them is going to help. If you force the issue, they'll probably just shut off the oil and wait while you reconsider.RockyMtnGuy (talk) 21:04, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for your comments. No, what I'm saying is that if what's happening in the U.S. is the result of or largely the result of manuipulation on the part of American oil companies and/or speculators, and many are saying it could be as I linked to above, then Congress should act. 4.246.201.22 (talk) 03:02, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

Out today Record gas prices: 20 straight days. "NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Retail gas prices hit record highs for the 20th day in a row, motorist group AAA's Web site showed Tuesday". Peak Oil or Gouging? 4.246.205.100 (talk) 18:45, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

The U.S. Congress has limited control over the issue. George Bush's response was to invade Iraq, and we know how well that went. The U.S. now imports 2/3 of its oil as well as a lot of its refined products (there hasn't been a new oil refinery built in the U.S. in over 30 years). Refinery profits are down because oil prices have been running ahead of fuel prices, so they're just now playing catch-up. U.S. fuel prices are considerably less than most places in the world, so there's still lots of upside potential on price. Chinese consumption is continuing to increase, and no oil suppliers other than Saudi Arabia have any surplus capacity. So, if world oil production peaks and starts to decline, expect the effects to be worse in the U.S. than other countries which are already used to high prices. RockyMtnGuy (talk) 19:35, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

Another reason for high prices: "Iraq War May Have Increased Energy Costs Worldwide by a Staggering $6 Trillion" "The invasion of Iraq by Britain and the US has trebled the price of oil, according to a leading expert, costing the world a staggering $6 trillion in higher energy prices alone. The oil economist Dr Mamdouh Salameh, who advises both the World Bank and the UN Industrial Development Organisation (Unido), told The Independent on Sunday that the price of oil would now be no more than $40 a barrel, less than a third of the record $135 a barrel reached last week, if it had not been for the Iraq war" [17]. Now it looks like W's planning to sabotage the next Presidency as well and make sure we're so mired in war that we'll never get out of it. "NEW YORK - The George W Bush administration plans to launch an air strike against Iran within the next two months, an informed source tells Asia Times Online, echoing other reports that have surfaced in the media in the United States recently" [18].

About nationalizing oil, as outright nationalization (simply taking over the oil companies) would prove to be highly contentious (though in the long run it would be a good solution), the U.S. government ought to start by going into competetion with Big Oil in the U.S. and abroad. The reverse of Bush and the neo-con-artist's "privatize everything" philosophy. Private corporations exist to make a profit, the government exists, in large part, to provide services, not to make a profit. The competition would force Big Oil to stop the shenanigans and bring down their prices. Of course Big Oil, which has created numerous "think tanks" otherwise known as 'liars for hire' to combat or delay as long as possible any change that might cut into their profits, such as any real action on climate change, would be all over it with tales of disaster if the government steps in. 4.246.207.183 (talk) 12:00, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

The Canadian government thought somewhat the same as you after the 1973 oil crisis, so in 1975 it started a government-owned oil company called Petro Canada. As a result of this it discovered a couple of interesting things:

1. It is possible to lose money in the oil business, if you don't know what you are doing. Petro-Canada probably cost them somewhere between $8 and $16 billion in total, including all the tax breaks, subsidies and special deals they had to make to keep it running.
2. The multinational oil companies are very efficient. They could make a profit selling gasoline at the same price Petro Canada was losing money at. Despite its mandate to force oil prices down, Petro-Canada kept trying to force them UP so it wouldn't lose so much money.

Eventually the Canadian government decided that running a money losing oil company selling high-price gasoline wasn't a lot of fun, and they privatized Petro-Canada. It is now doing very well and made $2.6 billion in profit last year. You probably don't know this, but they made a lot of it from you. Canada now exports more oil and refined products to the US than it consumes itself. I'm sure they appreciate having your business.RockyMtnGuy (talk) 05:07, 30 May 2008 (UTC)

I think the key comment you made above is "It is possible to lose money in the oil business, if you don't know what you are doing". Apparently in the case of Petrol-Canada it wasn't well thought out and was sort of a knee-jerk response to 1973. I'd hope that this time around the same mistakes would not be made. But I don't believe that somehow only the Big Oil companies have a natural ability to run an oil business. I'm not suggesting that the government sell gas at a loss, but at price to at least cover their costs. The fact that American Big Oil companies are reporting record profits shows that there is a lot of unnecessary profiting going on and room to lower the price. There's a difference between making a profit and making a killing. BTW, I noticed a tag at the bottom of that page that says "This article does not cite any references or sources". 4.246.201.206 (talk) 14:24, 30 May 2008 (UTC)

I can't help with the Petro-Canada article, all my information comes from unquotable sources. Oil companies keep a close eye on each other in case someone else hits something big, and by "close eye", I mean with binoculars and telephone descramblers. Besides, the topic is still highly political in Canada and would lead to edit wars.

There's no reason to believe a government knee-jerk response to price increases in 2008 would be any different than a government knee-jerk response to price increases in 1973. Governments are generally unsuited to running oil companies, or any kind of company where operating efficiently is a necessity.

However, the real reason the multinational oil companies are making so much money is that they have run out of places to drill for oil, so they're essentially liquidating their assets by producing all the oil and distributing all the value to shareholders. At the end of it all, they'll just hang up a big "Gone out of business" sign and retire to a golf course.RockyMtnGuy (talk) 18:43, 30 May 2008 (UTC)

"the real reason the multinational oil companies are making so much money is that they have run out of places to drill for oil". Well that is the question. And as I've been saying, some people are saying that there's still lots of oil left (the four examples I posted at the beginning of this section, to which you added Saskatchewan, are rather sizable) and that Big Oil is simply using the issue as a handy excuse to rake in record profits, sitting on finds and determined to ride out this gravy train as long as they can. Additionally, as per my comments at 04:19, 22 May 2008 above, they are also using the issue as a convenient excuse to push hard for drilling that they've been stymied in for decades. Again, it's the suddeness and timing of these events that has got me suspecious. I won't be at all surprised if, after awhile, they suddenly announce "Hey! Look what we just found!". That is unless they can convince everyone that oil is about to run out, then they can turn down the spigots and keep charging through the nose indefinitely. The financial motive is there. Maybe it is Peak Oil (and if so raises the question as to why Big Oil has been all but silent on the issue to the last moment) but one thing is clear, with questions in abundance there needs to be an ALL OUT investigation to settle the issue. Agreed? 4.246.206.221 (talk) 01:54, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

No, it's not all that sudden. Prices have been rising since about the year 2000. For years, people have been saying, "World oil production will peak in 20xx", and only the xx has been in dispute. The oil companies would like to dearly love to drill in places like the Alaska Wildlife Reserve or offshore Florida mainly because those are the only places they haven't drilled yet. The rest of the US looks like a giant pincushion.

Sure, the government can investigate the futures market, but these investigations usually determine that it's just business as usual. The futures market mostly consists of buyers for oil refineries, who want to lock up a future supply of oil, and sellers for oil companies, who want to lock in a good price. The problem arises when buyers try to buy oil x months in the future, and the sellers say "Sorry, we're sold out x months in the future." At that point the buyers panic and start to try to outbid each other, and they can bid high because they know that you, the consumer, will not balk at paying whatever it costs. The way to defeat this is to not buy. Walk or ride a bicycle instead. If you don't buy, the price for everyone else will go down.

The examples you posted at the start of this section are examples of pie in the sky. Nothing on that list is going to come on production for a decade, if ever. Meanwhile, the supply problem is now: Mexican production has fallen 400,000 barrels per day since the start of the year, Russian production has been falling since the start of the year, North Sea production has been falling for years, Alaska production has been falling for years, Indonesian production has fallen to the point that Indonesia dropped out of OPEC. People were hoping the Saudis could step in to fill the gap, but they don't seem interested (or maybe they don't have the oil.)

So, as you can see, its a global problem. In the US, production peaked and started falling 28 years ago despite everyone's best efforts. There's no reason to believe that the rest of the world will be any different than the US, but people want to believe that cheap oil will go on forever. It's like believing in perpetual motion. RockyMtnGuy (talk) 18:21, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

"No, it's not all that sudden". Again, "Thursday, light, sweet crude futures breached $135 a barrel, more than double the price a year ago" [19]. "People want to believe that cheap oil will go on forever". That's not me. My issue, as I've made clear, is that I think that there is reason to believe that the present oil crisis is not as simple as just saying "Peak Oil" and that there could well be some shenanigans going on. I'm just not willing to let Big Oil off the hook and give them the benefit of the doubt when one considers their long history of deception [20] or let them keep their ill gotten gains if they are cheating.

A May 2008 issue of a newsmagazine called "Journal Plus Magazine of the Central Coast" I picked up recently has an article (sorry, no link) about someone named "Al Stevens", whose latest occupation was as COO of Southwestern Energy Production in Houston, Texas. The article title is "The State of Gasoline - From an Oilman. Here's a quote: "'The world is not running out of oil or natural gas,' says Stevens firmly, a veteran geologist and around-the-world wildcatter who has also been part of managerial boardrooms for multinational oil companies including Chevron Oil, Exxon Oil Company, and Occidental Petroleum. 'In truth there is still a great deal of oil left to be recovered, and we're not running out anytime soon,' he continues.... Stevens says there is a great deal more oil yet to be discovered even in the United States.... 'It's just that the most promising areas are being held off the market for a lot of reasons right now' explains Stevens." Though he acknowledges that light, sweet crude discoveries are running lower.

While I'm no expert, the fact is that those who should know still have widely varing opinions on the matter. Some say there is still lots of oil left and blame high oil prices on fraud, some on the occupation of Iraq, some on unrest in Nigeria, some on market speculation, some on supply and demand, some on Peak Oil, etc. Sure it's a combination of all those things but in what proportions? And how much of the standard explanations which Big Oil wants us to swallow is just "spin" [21]. You yourself stated above "is oil is peaking or not?' The answer I could offer, based on 35 years experience in the oil industry, is 'Nobody knows.'" Clearly there exists a lot of uncertainty and that shows the need for a major settling of this important issue by unbiased sources. "So, as you can see, its a global problem"; doesn't it seem coincidental that most of the world's oil supplies seem to be peaking at about the same time [22]. Anyway, as I'm repeating myself and as I see that others below are objecting to these long discussions, I think I should wrap it up now. 4.246.204.120 (talk) 02:04, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Yes, it is getting rather verbose. The "Nobody knows" response I gave is better addressed in the predicting the timing of peak oil article, which points out "...the only reliable way to identify the timing of peak oil will be in retrospect". However, based the US peak of 1970, the global peak will come as a complete shock to a lot of people, many of them experts. At this point in time peak oil is theory, so it should be presented as such, with the caveat that people should be prepared for it to happen because it will inevitably happen sometime. Maybe now is the time.

And, no, all the world's oil supplies are not peaking at the same time. The U.S. peaked about 30 years ago. The North Sea peaked in the late 1990's. Mexico peaked just a few years ago. Canada and Brazil have some time to go before they peak. However, the global peak will occur when the declining countries outweigh the growing countries.

The popular press is not a good source for this article because reporters don't really know anything about the subject but are willing to speculate at great length. Press releases by foreign governments and oil companies are not that good either. Politicians are really bad because they know nothing but are always trying to find a scapegoat when they screw up. Government agencies tend to distort the facts because they have their own political agendas. The trade journals are probably your best source but first, you have to know where to find them and second, you have to know how to read them. As far as definitive studies are concerned - the International Energy Agency is conducting a review of the subject and will publish a report in November. Reportedly it's much more pessimistic than their previous studies. Somebody can cite it at that time. RockyMtnGuy (talk) 07:00, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

If it is Peak Oil they should have been easing us down, weaning us off and moving us to renewable alternatives decades ago rather than a sudden jolt. That's a scandal in it's own right. Anyway, thanks for the discussion RockyMtnGuy. 4.246.207.140 (talk) 13:11, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

(undent) With respect to the comment by Special:Contributions/4.246.203.6: "Again, it's the suddeness and timing of these events that has got me suspicious", see the Hirsch report, which explicitly claims peak oil could occur without warning. Also try Template:Google scholar cite and read some of those scholarly papers from the 1990s and early 2000s. Even when oil was selling near historic inflation adjusted lows, people who understood Hubbert peak theory were predicting the end of cheap oil, and subsequent events probably do not seem "sudden" to people who expected them for ten years or more. --Teratornis (talk) 22:31, 8 June 2008 (UTC)

Not to reopen this discussion but I think there's no denying that the current oil price crisis is about much more than peak oil. Some quotes from a Reuters story that, though it does warn about peak oil, makes clear that there's more going on here - which is what I was getting at, "DUBAI (Reuters) - OPEC members saw no need on Sunday to pump more oil in response to last week's double-digit surge in oil prices to over $139 a barrel that top exporter Saudi Arabia described as unjustified.... But Saudi Oil Minister Ali al-Naimi and his Pakistani counterpart met on Sunday and agreed that the price rise was unjustified and unrelated to market fundamentals, the official Saudi Press Agency reported.... OPEC blames factors beyond its control, including speculation and international political tension, for the price rises.... Iran is OPEC's second largest oil producer and the deepening dispute with the West over Tehran's nuclear ambitions has contributed to oil's rally.... Iran has large volumes of crude sitting in tankers offshore waiting for buyers.... Iraq expects its exports to hit a five-year high in June" [23]. So, among other factors, a big part of the price crisis is related to the US and other countries fighting of Israel's war. And, as I outlined above, I think there is good reason to suspect both the suddeness of the price increases and their timing. 4.246.206.98 (talk) 07:05, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

T. Boone Pickens

My appologies to 12.203.84.60. I dug a little deeper and found that T. Boone was on Beck's show tonight, but it still isn't showing on their website. But I still don't see any indication that he mentioned peak oil rather than high oil prices... not that it matters. This can only be settled in retrospect anyway. NJGW (talk) 02:27, 23 May 2008 (UTC)

Supply surpassed demand?

So I finally found some information about the Glenn Beck interview with T. Boone Pickens discussed above[24], and I see there that Pickens claims that production is only 85 mb/day while demand is 87 mb/day. Has this been reported anywhere else? Is it a question of light sweet crude supply diminishing only, or is all oil production combined down to 85? As we can see from the discussions above, production numbers can be hard to ferret out, so I'd hope someone with a better understanding of industry could help us out. Interestingly(?), I went to the EIA to see their annual May report, but it's been pushed back to June [25]. NJGW (talk) 00:48, 24 May 2008 (UTC)

Nobody really knows how much oil is being produced because some countries tend to lie about their production when it suits their purposes. However, T. Boone Pickens is no fool and he knows oil (he didn't become a billionaire by accident), so I would be inclined to say he's correct. It is beginning to look like there is a supply problem. In all previous oil crises, when the price went up, it pulled new non-OPEC oil onto the market, which drove prices right back down. In this crisis (it's not even a crisis, it's just business as usual), prices have been going up and up and up since 2003, and there's no new oil coming on line. The inference one would be inclined to draw from that is that there is no new oil coming on line because there's no new oil, period. So, 85 million barrels per day may be all there is, and from this point forward it's all downhill.

Now the Saudi's claim that 1) they can increase production any time they want to, and 2) there's no reason to increase oil production because supply and demand are in balance. They probably know that #2 is a specious argument because, having taken Economics 101 at a variety of expensive universities, they know that in a free market supply and demand are in balance at any equilibrium price. What oil shooting up to $135/barrel for no apparent reason tells you is that $135 is the new equilibrium price. The most likely explanation is that the supply curve has shifted left due to tighter supply, and market is rebalancing supply and demand by reducing demand to match they reduced supply. As for #2, Saudi policy is to flood the market with cheap oil any time the price gets too high to prevent non-OPEC oil from getting a foothold. They said they were going to increase production a few years ago, and they didn't. They claim that is because they don't feel like it any more, but the satellite photos appear to show a lot of drilling activity despite no new production coming on line, and the skeptics are arguing that the Saudis are not producing more oil because they can't. RockyMtnGuy (talk) 05:36, 24 May 2008 (UTC)

While no doubt petroleum is a finite resource, the fact that it is priced in dollars and subject to Futures contract trading, along with large surpluses of global capital looking for a safe place to earn returns in the wake of the sub prime lending failures makes me, at least, question if the current prices quoted are, in fact, reflective of supply. While the article's focus is on the phenomena of a diminishing supply of a finite resource, the futures markets (rarely discussed, I've noted, with respect to Peak Oil) are often used to gauge how much remains of a given commodity. Might hanky panky in the commodity markets explain price surges to 135/bbl? By the way, as to why the financial aspect is important to this issue in terms of evaluating sources, T. Boone Pickens said he was "short" on crude oil futures as late as 22 Feb 2008 but that he would go long later in the year. There is additional data that indicates something is "off" in the futures markets: fewer cars on California highways and the Saudis' token production increase of 300,000 bbls per day . In a "transparent" futures market, this information would push the price down, if only a little. Instead, the markets continue to signal (irrationally?) that demand is expected to surge. Since futures markets can be pushed (for a time) on psychology and big moves of capital, it's not as simple as saying we've hit a new supply/demand equilibrium. The same thing happened in the housing markets (and a lot of that money that was pulled out of that bubble ended up in -- you guessed it -- the commodities markets). TinkerTailorSoldier (talk) 04:46, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

The reference that I added to the article yesterday, Asia Times Online article (which was reverted back out by user:Otolemur crassicaudatus on the very next edit) discussed this, pointing out that the Bush administration in the USA has taken the oil futures market out of the jurisdiction of the regulator. This has made all sorts of underhanded dealings possible. Arguably, current prices have little or nothing to do with supply and demand. --Athol Mullen (talk) 07:08, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

The Asia Times article falls into the "This can't really be happening, it must be a conspiracy" category. So, let's cover all the bases. On the supply side, non-OPEC division, British and Norwegian North Sea production is in long-term decline and getting to the steep part of the decline curve. Mexican production is falling off the table as their Cantarell field tanks. Russian productions is down and one of their oil execs just said they can't keep up rates. On the OPEC front, Nigeria is having problems with civil unrest, Venezuela is down due to government mucking about, and nobody else is increasing production. The only OPEC producer with surplus capacity is Saudi Arabia, and they are not leaping into the gap. On the demand side, US and European consumption is down a hair, but China is coming on gangbusters with double-digit growth rates, stockpiling for the Olympics, and running diesel generators after their recent earthquake. India and other growing economies are also consuming more. And, here's a factor that people don't often consider, OPEC members are consuming more and more of their own production. Most of them have very high population growth rates (there's nothing like having four wives to increase the birth rate), and they don't charge world price at home, so their people don't see any reason to conserve (drive fast, freeze an American). So OPEC is consuming more and more of its own production, leaving less for the developed world. The net result is that global consumption is increasing while production is not. So, it's crunch time, folks.RockyMtnGuy (talk) 17:57, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

I don't understand the 4 wives thing, surely the ratio of men to women in OPEC countries is still roughly 1:1, so all you have done is shift the production from 4 fathers to 1. --Jaded-view (talk) 04:09, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

I was being facetious. Some of the Arab oil princes have 40+ children, but that's beside the point. The real issue is that in some Muslim countries, the average woman has eight children (in the rest, it's less but still high). Regardless of the number of fathers involved, that constitutes a long-term demographic problem in terms of population overrunning resources.RockyMtnGuy (talk) 19:42, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

Ok. Incidently, without oil might the US might also be over populated? The UK almost certainly is.--Jaded-view (talk) 00:32, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

Other than oil, the US has lots of resources to support its population. It has more farmland than China to support a population 1/4 the size. The problem it has is that its consumption of oil far exceeds its ability to produce it. Even the UK has enough farmland to support its population, and until recently it produced more oil than it consumed, so it isn't really over populated. Since its population is not really growing it can keep going indefinitely if it can deal with the depletion of oil. OTOH, Saudi Arabia's population has grown from about 5 million in 1960 to about 27 million today. By the time it runs out of oil it will have more people than the UK, and it doesn't have the resources to support that many people. When it runs out of oil, and it will inevitably run out of oil, things are likely to get unpleasant in Saudi Arabia. And by unpleasant, I mean something probably involving people dying. RockyMtnGuy (talk) 01:40, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

...as distinct from the way things are today in Nigeria, Iran, and Afghanistan. Many countries have less than equitable benefit to their citizens from their natural resources. National "leaders" who take personal profit from natural resources are better able to hold on to power than those who don't. That's an ugly reality of the human condition that goes back a very long time. It worked pretty well for the Pharoes for many generations. Now however, we are getting into the Lake Woebegon era, when "everyone is above average" and there are a lot of us. Perhaps a global one-child policy? LeadSongDog (talk) 18:07, 30 May 2008 (UTC)

(undent)Okay, this is getting out of hand on many levels. This talk page is for the discussion of the article, not the subject matter itself. If you have ideas on how to improve the article than by all means talk about them, but while there are a great many excellent web forums for discussion of this subject matter, this isn't one of them. See WP:NOTFORUM. Trusilver 02:16, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

I'm not so sure about what you say here Trusilver... many of the issues discussed here, properly ref'ed, should be made part of the article (or perhaps Oil price increases since 2003). NJGW (talk) 15:09, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

One way to elevate the discussion would be with some more references. Check out this citation tool: {{Google scholar cite}}. For example, try these searches:

• Template:Google scholar cite
• Template:Google scholar cite (same search, restricted to papers from 2007 and 2008)

--Teratornis (talk) 21:55, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

Click the "{{Wikify}}" link below a search result to generate a {{Cite journal}} or {{Cite book}} template, with fields prefilled with bibliographic information. --Teratornis (talk) 21:56, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

Citations

Why do the citation numbers not match up? i.e. ^[142] points to 141--Omnipotence407 (talk) 19:41, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

Try purging the page. --Teratornis (talk) 21:51, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

"there are finite resources in the ground, but you never get to that point"

That quote is not that important as the exceptional position it has in the article indicates. It is clearly chosen by someone that has no idea what peak oil means, and has not taken the time to even read the basics around the theory surrounding it. In short, one has to be mentally deficient to not understand after reading a lot of relevant material that oil will never be "totally" depleted; what's more obvious than that? Of course there will never be "100%" depletion; that's like saying if the air becomes unbreathable because of toxic gases and people perish, that oxygen will be "100%" depleted; it won't be 100% depleted, it will just be insufficient. --Leladax (talk) 02:12, 16 June 2008 (UTC)

Peak Oil and Peak Petroleum - EIA Statistics

Care should be given on all sides of the Peak Oil debate to definitions. Peak Oil theoryhypothesis is an extension of the observation that the quantity of production from any source of a finite resource tends to follow a bell curve over time. The bell curve's time axis expands when the assumption of fixed real cost of production is relaxed, but in general, holds.

All information is from the EIA.

Limiting an analysis to just conventional crude oil is a very strong assumption. This "crude oil" assumption results in substantially different conclusions than relaxing the analysis to include wider ranges of stored energy liquids. Is the world depleting low cost of production crude oil? Of course it is. Has the world reached or is it near peak production of crude oil? Perhaps. But this is a logical fallacy if one ignores petroleum liquids other than crude oil which are online now and are used in the production of consumed products as an energy source. Peak Oil is also an analysis in a vacuum if it ignores the range of substitutes to crude oil in terms of price and supply.

If for example, an analysis is using the figure of 84.6 million barrels per day in 2007 of global production (as estimated by the EIA), then the analysis is not considering just crude oil but rather a basket of liquid hydrocarbon sources. This basket is comprised of crude oil, condensates, natural gas plant liquids, refining processing gains, and certain other liquids. For example, the U.S. produced 5.1 million bbl/d of crude and condensates, 1.0 million bbl/d of refinery processing gains, 1.8 million bbl/d of natural gas plant liquids and 0.6 million bbl/d of other HC/Oxygenates of which 0.42 million bbl/d was ethanol blended during refining. The U.S. consumed 20.7 million bbl/d during 2007. If an analysis compares the 5.1 million bbl/d of crude oil production to the 20.7 million bbl/d of consumption it is comparing apples and oranges. Peak Oil analysis I've seen are conveniently and consistently limited to the US's 5.1 million bbl/d of domestic crude oil production and ignore 3.4 million bbl/d of other stored energy liquids that are produced in the US and are used in the production of the 20.7 million bbl/d of consumed liquid petroleum products.

Using this definition of oil (including these convensional condensates, NGPLs, refining gains - mostly resulting from the drop in specific gravity of the liquids during refining -, and hydrocarbon/oxygenate adds) the world's top producers of input source petroleum liquids (in thousands of barrels per day) according to the EIA are:

2007 Rank	Country	Peak Year	Peak Year Amount	2007 Amount
1	Saudi Arabia	2005	11,096	10,234
2	Russia	2007	9,876	9,876
3	USA	1985	11,192	8,481
4	Iran	2005	4,238	4,043
5	China	2007	3,901	3,901
6	Mexico	2004	3,848	3,501
7	Canada	2007	3,358	3,358
8	UAE	2007	2,948	2,948
9	European Union	1999	4,076	2,818
10	Venezuela	1997	3,518	2,667
11	Kuwait	2006	2,675	2,613
12	Norway	2001	3,423	2,565
13	Nigeria	2005	2,630	2,352
14	Brazil	2007	2,279	2,279
15	Algeria	2007	2,173	2,173
16	Iraq	2000	2,582	2,094
17	Libya	2007	1,845	1,845
18	Angola	2007	1,769	1,769
19	Kazakhstan	2007	1,445	1,445
20	Qatar	2006	1,141	1,136
21	Indonesia	1981	1,712	1,044
22	India	2007	881	881
23	Azerbaijan	2007	850	850
24	Argentina	1998	917	791
25	Oman	2000	972	714
26	Malaysia	2004	862	703
27	Egypt	1996	934	664
28	Australia	2000	828	595
29	Columbia	1999	830	543
30	Ecuador	2006	536	512

Several countries which had peak production prior to 2007 are projected to set new highs in the future in the EIA's "reference" model, for example, Columbia. Even more countries with highs set prior to 2007 establish new future highs in the high price model.

Hubbert observed that production of crude oil from any single source of a finite resource such as crude oil follows a bell curve over time. In his original Peak Oil work he summated these bell curves and concludes that production of crude oil from all conventional sources will also result in a bell curve and used this to estimate the date of US crude oil peak production. The difference in moving from a single source to Peak Oil's all sources is a larger time scale to the bell curve.

If one then relaxes the assumption of conventional crude oil to all conventional petroleum liquids plus conventional oxygenates the bell curve will result again but with an even larger time scale (as stated above, the US produced 5.1 million bbl/d in 2007 of crude but 8.5 million bbl/d of conventional petroleum liquids.

If the assumption is relaxed again to include unconventional petroleum liquids (for example Canadian tar sands, Mexican and Venezuelan ultra heavy, biofuels, coal to liquids, and gas to liquids) the bell curve expands again with even a pessimistic peak well into this century. If you relax the assumption again to include sustain higher prices at or above the current $130, then shale comes into play and the bell curve extends out into the next century.

If you relax the stored energy liquids assumption of Peak Oil to include stored energy liquids and compressed gases then hydrogen enters the bell curve and the bell curve expands into centuries or even millennium and becomes a curve of the depletion of uranium, ignoring solar. Assume fusion power at some point later this century and the bell curve expands into eons. The last time crude oil was above $100 per barrel (in 2006 real dollars) was 1864. This new unconventional source of oil replaced depleting bio-oils as a liquid energy source. The economy and planet kept on turning. 38.112.20.26 (talk) 18:32, 18 June 2008 (UTC)glennscott9

So peak oil is wrong because some day we'll use hydrogen and uranium instead? All you've done is prove that this should only be covering sweet crude, and ignoring unconventional oil. Every non-renewable commodity has a Hubbert curve. Would you like to suggest a way to improve the article? NJGW (talk) 20:45, 18 June 2008 (UTC)

I was quite clear that the peak oil hypothesis is correct, stating, "Is the world depleting low cost of production crude oil? Of course it is. Has the world reached or is it near peak production of crude oil? Perhaps." Your question, "So peak oil is wrong because some day we'll use hydrogen and uranium instead?" is rhetoric. I have know idea what your pronoun "this" is that you contend I've proved.

I stipulated that all non-renewable resources have a Hubbert curve. What I stated, I thought clearly, was that the shape and size of any Hubbert Curve is dependent upon the definition of what you are measuring. Is there a Hubbert Curve for light sweet crude? Yes ... and then there is another Hubbert Curve for all conventional crude oil with a peaking year further out in time and maximum production greater than the light sweet crude curve. And then there is another Hubbert Curve for all conventional petroleums with a peaking year beyond that at a higher level of total production. Then there is yet another Hubbert Curve for all conventional plus first tier non-conventionals (crude + condensates + NGPL + RG + Conventional HC/Oxygenate Liquids + Ultra Heavy Crude + Tar Sands + Coal to Oil + Gas to Oil). This Hubbert Curve has a peak decades from now at levels significantly higher than the conventional oil Hubbert Curve. Beyond that is yet another Hubbert Curve for all conventional plus first tier non-conventionals plus shale. This Hubbert Curve has a peak centuries from now.

Right now we are starting to substitute conventional gasoline engines with a set of new engines and motors. Consider a world in which say 50% of the power of your 2015 car comes from gasoline burned in a small efficient engine and 50% comes from stored electric power you bought from your electric utility. Lets assume all electric power is produced by burning coal. All you have done effectively is exactly the same thing in terms of resource depletion as adding South African style coal to liquid gasoline unconventional to the Hubbert depletion model. Its simply a matter of economics whether its cheaper to crack coal into gasoline or burn it in a giant utility plant transmit the energy to you as electricity and then use that to add power to your small gasoline engine. The world will probably do both depending upon localized economics.

A 2008 $4 gallon of US gasoline (9.22 million bbl/d of consumption)is about:

28% Domestic Crude Oil (4% Alaskan + 7% Gulf of Mexico + 17% Lower 48)

5% Domestic Refining Gains

10% Natural Gas Plant Liquids (NGPL)

4% Mostly Domestic Hydrocarbon/Oxygenate liquid adds (3% Ethanol 1% other, the US imported a trivial 28,000 bbl/d in 2007 of fuel Ethanol, 12,000 from Brazil, 5,000 from El Salvador, 5,000 from Jamaica ...)

53% Imported Petroleum (19% Canadian comprised of 9% crude + 2% NGPL + 8% Tar Sands Unconventional Oil, 15% Saudi Arabian, 14% Mexican some of which is unconventional heavy, 11% Venezuelan some of which is heavy, 11% Nigerian, 5% Angolan, 5% Iraqi, 4% Algerian, 2% Ecuadorian, 2% Kuwaiti, 2% Brazil, 1% Columbian, 1% Russian, 1% British, 7% everyone else none above 1%).

Now jump ahead to 2015. Assume the US follows a price shock efficiency gain similar post-1979(when we went from the last oil crisis to the last global oil glut in 1986). Post 1979 average mpg of the fleet went from 17 mpg to 22 mpg in the mid-1980s. 13% gain on 90% of the vehicles with gasoline engines (including Prius-style internal storage hybrids) and a 10% market share for Hydrogen Fuel Cells evolving along the 2008 Hondas, 100% plug-in electric evolving the 2009 Chevy Volt, and 2nd Generation Prius Hybrids with plug in charging). Assume this fleet in total gets 50% of its power from external electric including the electric power needed to crack the water into hydrogen.

In 2015, 2008's gasoline consumption of 9.22 million bbl/d is dropped to 8.9 from conventional fleet gains along the post-1979 experience on 90% of the fleet plus an additional reduction of .46 million bbl/d from 10% of the fleet going plug-in Electric/Hydrogen with 50% of power from gasoline. This would suggest a 2015 usage of 8.44 million bbl/d of gasoline - this is just an estimate, but its plausible. In 2008 about half of all petroleum and other hydrocarbon liquids are used for gasoline. Assume that there are no net gains on non-gasoline uses of petroleum as economic growth washes productivity and substitution gains - this is a very conservative assumption. So we are talking around 17.75 million bbl/d of inputs of which 9.31 million goes to non-gasoline usage.

Assume the EIA's most recent (June 2007) reference case 2015 unconventional hydrocarbon liquids production. These figures in light of changes from 2007 to 2008 are conservative.

2015:

2.3 million bbl/d - Canadian Oil Sands

1.0 million bbl/d - Heavy/Ultra Heavy Crude

1.4 million bbl/d - Biofuels

0.6 million bbl/d - Coal to Liquids

0.5 million bbl/d - Natural Gas to Liquids

These figures are global but would be disproportionly consumed in the US (the expectation being that the Chinese will probably go hard with coal to liquids).

So in 2015 the US would look something like this:

30% Domestic Crude Oil

5% Domestic Refining Gains

11% Natural Gas Plant Liquids (NGPL)

6% Mostly Domestic Hydrocarbon/Oxygenate liquid adds (5% Ethanol)

2% Coal to Liquids

1% Natural Gas to Liquids

1% Domestic Heavy, Sands and Shale

44% Imported Petroleum (of which Canadian Tar Sands would rise to 15% and 2% NGPL, Mexican and Venezuelan heavy and even ultra would be roughly 8%, leaving conventional imported crude at comprising a gallon of U.S. gasoline at 19%).

"Would you like to suggest a way to improve the article?" I did in the original post and will respond further now.

Begin with the 2nd graph in the main article which shows ASPO and other depletion models. The graph itself shows a wide range of peaking years due to a great extent to the definitional issues I raised. There are apple models which show crude oil only, peaches which show crude oil and Natural Gas Liquids (what the EIA and I called Natural Gas Plant Liquids, not to be confused with unconventional gas to liquid) and orange models which cover all conventional liquids - crude oil, condensates, NGPL, refining gains and liquid blends. In the production of consumed liquid petroleum products all these conventional source resources are currently used in significant quantities.

The graph uses 2004 data. The meaning of historic data then from 1940 through 2004 is unclear. The graph combines models of Crude Oil, Crude Oil + NGPL and Crude Oil + All Conventionals. The actual production histories of these three resources should be graphed from a reputable source - say EIA. Then each of the models should be labeled with the year they were run and graphed from that point forward.

What a neutral article should show is a graph with a series of Hubbert Curves for a series of ever broader definitions of resources. If you people want to simply make assumptions which prove your political positions go ahead and graph Hubbert Curves of depleting light sweet crude. I’ll be filling up in 2015 my 40 mpg car with gasoline and 11 cent kilowatt coal-fired electricity. That this gasoline is comprised of significantly depleting light sweet crude is true and also solved. The sky hasn’t fallen either. 38.112.20.26 (talk) 19:21, 19 June 2008 (UTC)glennscott9

What you didn't stipulate clearly is why you would lump those various energy sources together in a big Hubbert curve. There's a whole section on non-conventional oil and it's effect on Peak oil, and given that most of the numbers out right now include these non-conventional figures, I'm not sure what you'd want changed as far that those are concerned. As for the other resources, right now we have a petroleum economy, and all of our technology (from fuels and plastic parts to lubes and cleaning supplies and fertilizers) rely on petroleum. There's a whole article about changing that fact (mitigation of peak oil), but just saying it could happen doesn't make it so. Sure, we could make oil of coal, but then you'd have waaaayyyy less for you electricity. Now, what I'd really like to see you do is make petroleum out of nuclear power.

Hubbert warned about this in the 50s, we saw what could happen in a hurry in the 70s, and Hirsch wrote a whole report in the 90s for the government that said we still weren't on the right track. You are asking for a graph showing something that isn't happening. The fact that you hope to be driving a hybrid that only gets 40 mpg in 2015 shows you're just as non-serious about dealing with the real issues here as too many others... that's just not progress. There were cars in the 1940s that were that efficient (the Crosley got 50mpg!) without the need to burn more coal besides. And all the while demand keeps going up and up and up. NJGW (talk) 03:56, 20 June 2008 (UTC)

"You are asking for a graph showing something that isn't happening."

Graph 2 shows precisely that. See Graph 2's current non-crude conventionals which are the plots labeled "All" rather than "CO" for crude only. EIA's crude plus conventional has a peak beyond 2030. Why the assertion that conventionals aren't happening given that the difference between crude only and crude plus conventionals is in the millions of bbl/d right now.

International Energy Outlook 2007 - Report #:DOE/EIA-0484(2007)- Release Date: May 2007 Table G2. World Conventional Liquids Production by Region and Country, Reference Case, 1990-2030 (Million Barrels Oil Equivalent per Day)

Year	1990	2004	2005	2010	2015	2020	2025	2030
Total World	65.7	80.4	81.9	86.2	91.6	96.5	101.4	107.2

Note: Conventional liquids include crude oil and lease condensates, natural gas plant liquids, and refinery gains. Sources: History: Energy Information Administration (EIA), Office of Energy Markets and End Use. Projections: EIA, System for the Analysis of Global Energy Markets, run 2007March21a (2007).

Then we could take up non-conventionals which are in place now. If you were to plot EIA's Crude + Conventionals + Non-Conventionals the Hubbert Curve will peak well above 120 million bbl/d beyond 2030. Then there's a trillion barrels of American Shale beyond that.

Report #:DOE/EIA-0484(2007) - Here is the history of non-conventional HC Liquids (million bbl/d):

Year	Canadian Tar Sands	Heavy	BioFuels	Coal Liquids	Gas Liquids	Others	Total
1980	0.2	0.0	0.1	0.0	0.0	0.0	0.2
1990	0.4	0.0	0.2	0.1	0.0	0.0	0.7
2000	0.7	0.2	0.2	0.1	0.3	0.2	1.7
2004	1.1	0.6	0.4	0.08	0.3	0.2	2.6
2010	1.9	0.9	1.3	0.3	0.2	0.0	4.5
2015	2.3	1.0	1.4	0.6	0.5	0.0	5.8
2020	2.7	1.2	1.5	1.1	0.8	0.0	7.3
2025	3.2	1.4	1.6	1.8	1.0	0.0	9.0
2030	3.6	1.7	1.7	2.4	1.2	0.0	10.5

The EIA is scheduled to update this soon, no doubt with the recent spike in conventional crude oil, the supply of unconventionals will increase. My suspicion is that the projections of future Chinese Coal to Liquids are underestimated.

The gallon of US 2008 gasoline going into your car is comprised of:

8% Canadian Tar Sand Unconventional Oil

12% Natural Gas Plant Liquids (American & Canadian) - Conventional

5% Refining Gains - Conventional

4% Other Hydrocarbon Adds of which 3% is Ethanol

7% Mexican and Venezuelan Unconventional Heavy Oil

64% Conventional Crude (susbtantially reduced % from 1980).

BOTTOM LINE ON THE IMPLICATIONS OF PEAK OIL:

Is there a Hubbert Curve for global Crude Oil? Yes, for any given price.

Is that peak immanent? Maybe

At what level is crude going to peak? Depends a lot on price and substitutions but 70 million bbl/d is on the low end and 100 million on the high.

When will this occur? Probably, somewhere between now and 2030

Why the range? Because any finite resource has a set of Hubbert Curves that results when you relax the simple model's fixed price assumption. There is a fixed quantity of oil on Earth. How much of it can be recovered is dependent on price, which pays for the cost of that recovery and the tech to be able to recover it. The integral of the Hubbert Curve is the total amount of production. The peak of the Hubbert curve and the rest of its shape is complex and the difference between the integral of the Hubbert Curve that humanity actual experiences and the total amount of oil on Earth is an extremely large quantity. This economically and technically unrecoverable amount is so large in fact that small changes in the price of oil, results in small changes to the percent of oil that is economically recoverable. But when you ably a small percentage change to a large quantity the changing results represents years in terms of altered peaks and changes of millions, maybe tens of millions of bbl/d of peak production.

Then it gets even more complex when you allow price to vary and you apply it also to the demand side. So as the price of oil rises more oil is recoverable but less is demanded as consumption switches to alternatives. Say for example, hydrogen. So when you raise price the new Hubbert curve will have a lower peak due to lower demand and demand side substitutions but a greater total area due to supply side tech and cost recovery.

So from an evironmental point of view isn't high oil prices good? That's not clear. High oil price will mean that the total area of the Hubbert Curve will become larger, so the total amount of carbon burned is greater. But the peak usage of oil will be lower, so the rate of the carbon injection is slower. You need to consider the time carbon remains in the atmosphere and the marginal effects of atmospheric carbon levels.

U.S. crude oil production peaked in 1970 at 9.64 million bbl/d. But we took off-shore drilling in the Eastern Gulf, Atlantic and Pacific along with ANWR offline for environmental and political reasons (although the peak may still have been in 1970 had they been allowed). By the way, as evidence that a simple Hubbert Curve is price dependent, U.S. crude oil production is currently increasing again even though we are beyond our 1970 peak.

Will this mean that there will be less physical petroleum derived products after the date of global crude Peak Oil? No, this is the fundamental flaw in the Peak Oil Advocate's arguments. This flaw is in the form of a non-sequitur: Hubbert Curves are true and the peak of crude oil is at hand (a plausible if not outright true minor premise), therefore the world is about to run out of gasoline (false major premise).

Why is that? Because there are a lot of very close substitutes for crude oil as an input for petroleum based outputs, like gasoline.

But aren't those substitutes theoretical? No, these substitutes are called "conventional" hydrocarbon liquids and production is about 10 million bbl/d globally right now. These conventionals are not exotic and have been used for decades. When you plot the crude + conventional Peak Oil Hubbert curve the peak is at least 2030 and the production per day is over 110 million bbl/d. The US Department of Energy "reference" case model of June 2007 estimated 2030 global conventional oil production at 107 million bbl/d. The reference case is a set of assumptions is a mid-price with moderate global economic growth assumption.

U.S. crude production is 5.1 million bbl/d. U.S. Crude + Conventional production is about 8.8 million bbl/d and is rising! DOE estimates the US domestic crude plus conventional production will climb to 9.5 million bbl/d through 2020.

Do you mean things Canadian tar sands? No, those are called "non-conventional" oil and represent another set of next best substititutes to crude oil and the conventionals. Currently, the world is producing about 3.5 million barrels per day of these non-conventional hydrocarbons. When you plot the Hubbert Curve for crude + conventional + non-conventional, we're still on the left hand side of the curve in 2030 in the DOE model at 118 million bbl/d and rising.

Currently the U.S. is producing about 9.2 million bbl/d of Crude + Conventionals + Non-Conventionals. The DOE's reference case projects U.S. Crude + Conventionals + Non-Conventionals to rise to 10.1 million bbl/d through 2030.

So here is the 2007 DOE model for Crude + Conventionals and Non-Conventionals - Globally (million bbl/d) from http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/ieo/ieopol.html

Year 2030

Scenario Conventional Non-Conventional Total

Low Price 128.3 5.4 133.7

Reference 107.2 10.5 117.7

High Price 89.1 14.3 103.4

38.112.20.26 (talk) 20:48, 20 June 2008 (UTC)glennscott9

1. Please review your points, such as missing info from graphs... it's actually there.
2. Please add links to outside graphs INSTEAD of tables and copy/paste jobs; this will increase readability of your posts.
3. Please remove the political commentary from your post. It makes it too long to read, and this is not a political forum. Also, you need to start adding citations for any allegations you feel are somehow important enough to stay on this talk page.
4. Feel free to suggest cited text for an addition to the section on Peak oil criticisms. NJGW (talk) 21:26, 20 June 2008 (UTC)

"If you relax the assumption again to include sustain higher prices at or above the current $130, then shale comes into play and the bell curve extends out into the next century." Comes into play - when? Oil shale isn't something one flips on with a switch. Building the extraction plants and associated infrastructure takes decades, and the Law of Unintended Consequences can interfere at any point. (The oil shale industry has been burned before by unexpected drops in oil prices following price shocks. This further delays the necessary investment.) The relatively easier Athabasca Oil Sands have their extraction-rate limits as well; from the peak oil article:

• Another study claims that even under highly optimistic assumptions, "Canada's oil sands will not prevent peak oil," although production could reach 5 million bbl/day by 2030 in a "crash program" development effort.
  • Söderbergh, B.; Robelius, F.; Aleklett, K. (2007). "A crash programme scenario for the Canadian oil sands industry" (PDF). Energy Policy. 35 (3). Elsevier: 1931–1947. doi:10.1016/j.enpol.2006.06.007. Retrieved 2008-06-17.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)

Exponential growth in demand for oil makes short work of any increase in reserves. Two billion emerging middle-class consumers in China and India aspire to the gaswasting U.S. lifestyle; if they get what they want, oil consumption could multiply fast enough to burn quickly through any conceivable expansion in unconventional oil extraction. In the meantime, the world has added about 250,000,000 new people since world oil extraction plateaued in 2005; all the new arrivals essentially have to eat oil, since the non-petroleum-dependent fraction of agriculture hasn't been adequate to feed the world's exploding population for decades. See Albert Bartlett's lecture: Arithmetic, Population, and Energy. --Teratornis (talk) 19:48, 21 June 2008 (UTC)

Increases in tar sand production in the EIA's high price model represent only 28% of increased non-conventional oil production from 2005 through 2030. EIA shows 4.4 million bbl/d of tar sand oil by 2030. Total conventional and nonconventional does not peak in this report. Global Insight contributes a section in the report regarding global GDP growth and total energy consumption which shows exponential economic growth and linear total energy consumption.

• • U.S. Energy Informational Administration (2007). "International Energy Outlook - 2007" (PDF). Retrieved 2008-06-23. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)

38.112.20.26 (talk) 20:45, 23 June 2008 (UTC)glennscott9

Peak Oil "theory"

Peak Oil is not a "theory", though it is referred to thusly in so many places it is probably not fixable. Though I support it heartily, it is a hypothesis, with much supporting evidence but not yet proven (and as noted in the excellent article, probably only provable in the rear view mirror - of an SUV, noted while the driver is not paying attention to the road ahead).

A quibble, but it is pertinent in relation to other domains. 130.221.224.7 (talk) 19:18, 18 June 2008 (UTC)

It seems to me that peak oil, as it is related to the availability of a commodity, is an economic theory rather than a scientific theory (and how often do we hear about economic hypotheses?). Its basis is that as production (driven by consumption of course) of a non-renewable resource rises, the unavoidable decline of production of that resource grows nearer. There doesn't seem any room to argue that at some point oil production will begin to fall, other then the question of when... therefore it makes more sense to call it an economic theory than a hypothesis. What's funny to me is when the abiotic hypothesis of oil gets called a theory. NJGW (talk) 20:41, 18 June 2008 (UTC)

The scientific method isn't really useful for economic forecasts. As soon as a model/hypothesis is published that shows consistent ability to predict historic trends (retrospective experimentation), some players use it to predict the futures markets for their own advantage, distorting those markets in the process and rendering the model/hypothesis self-defeating. LeadSongDog (talk) 21:21, 18 June 2008 (UTC)

Hubbert peak theory is a theory which is testable against the historical production curves of many mineral resources in many regions of the Earth. People have extracted several resources to local exhaustion in various places, giving fairly complete extraction histories to test Hubbert peak theory against. (For a drastic example, see Easter Island, but unfortunately the survivors did not leave records of exactly how fast they chopped down all the island's trees, so the date of "peak lumber" for Easter Island is unknowable today.) "Peak oil" is a prediction that the world is the sum of its parts - that is, if Hubbert peak theory is useful for predicting the oil extraction schedule for different regions of the Earth, it should be useful for predicting the extraction schedule for all those regions summed together. As to whether the scientific method "isn't really useful for economic forecasts," the only way it wouldn't be useful would be if the underlying physical phenomena did not obey laws of nature. Economics is (in principle) reducible to social science, which reduces to psychology, which reduces to biology, which reduces to chemistry, which reduces to physics. Physics is orderly, so everything deriving from physics should be orderly (although the order may be stupefyingly complex and beyond the current grasp of science in many domains). It will be a long time before scientists can predict economic behavior from first principles (indeed, just predicting chemistry from physics is incredibly difficult, see the protein folding problem), but scientists have all sorts of ways to model higher-order behavior. If publishing a predictive model changes the system that the model predicts, the model can account for those changes. Ah, but then some players will account for the model accounting for them, and further subvert it. Ecologists and behavioral scientists have used the scientific method to study those sorts of phenomena (game theory, predator-prey dynamics), in which opposing players react to each other in turn. Also, one should note that merely publishing a theory does not instantly inform all players of it - knowledge takes time to spread, even knowledge which is very useful, in part because everyone has to sort through overwhelming amounts of mostly irrelevant information, and because of various cognitive filters people apply, such as not invented here. Hubbert peak theory is not so much a prediction about how much a commodity will cost, but a prediction of the extraction schedule. Politicians and traders can force prices up or down to some extent, but they don't have much effect on the shape of the extraction curve, because they lack the ability to put more oil in the ground. Hubbert peak theory is not a prediction about the short term behavior of commodities markets, but it can give some insight about when to take long or short positions (as Richard Rainwater demonstrated, by grasping the concept of peak oil several years earlier than most other traders). --Teratornis (talk) 16:59, 21 June 2008 (UTC)

numeric results of burning oil

May I suggest the addition of the following topic?

What will the atmospheric concentration of CO2 be if the proven oil reserves are combusted to CO2?

Same for probable reserves?

Same for p/p natural gas reserves.

Same for p/p unconventional sources.

The article covers many interesting details about the supply side of carbon-based energy, but doesn't mention much about the (non-controversial) stoichiometric effects of exploiting it.

Lllbutcher (talk) 08:17, 19 June 2008 (UTC)

Bogus discussion. It's completely rate dependent. If you take a billion years to burn it, there's no significant effect. Do it in one day, you wipe out the mammals.LeadSongDog (talk) 14:24, 19 June 2008 (UTC)

Also more appropriate type of topic for a different set of articles. This article doesn't cover pollution. NJGW (talk) 03:12, 20 June 2008 (UTC)

I don't actually know if "Do it in one day, you wipe out the mammals" is true. This is because I don't know how much proven or probable carbon is available (moles). That calculation is missing in this article.

An interesting number to compare available carbon to might be the amount of carbon presently in the atmosphere (moles), since at present most or all carbon-based fuels result in atmospheric CO2.

The production rate dependence is important, because carbon doesn't stay in the atmosphere. The Atmospheric_CO2 wiki page has an interesting discussion about where carbon ends up, and how quickly it moves. Surely a cross-reference would be welcome, as well as a reference to a discussion of other ways to dispose of combustion products.

I recently read a popular press article which says that an average M**2 of earth produces an average of 0.5KG/year in plant mass. This sort of factiod, converted to mass of carbon, would also be interesting to compare to proven/probably reserves of carbon-based materials.

(Another interesting number ot compare against might be the CO2 in the sea.)

I am asking a quantitative question, and it has no political content. It's counting isotopes. It is identical to asking how much dirt was excavated while constructing the Panama Canal, and comparing it to, for instance, the size of a familiar mountain or a familiar volume KM**3.

I don't agree that there is a need to avoid the sensitive topic of "pollution". CO2 is not "pollution". It is mass balance.

Mass calculations, and comparisons to other reservoirs of carbon, would improve this article. EVEN IF there is another article elsewhere discussing movement of C and consequences thereof.

Lllbutcher (talk) 09:00, 20 June 2008 (UTC)

Reading my response here, I see that I am really suggesting something different from my first suggestion. I was wrong to originally mention "effects of exploiting it". That doesn't capture the improvement I imagine.

I think the article could be improved by doing numeric calculations of the amount of carbon (here oil) in comparison to other carbon reservoirs without speculating about consequences.

Lllbutcher (talk) 09:07, 20 June 2008 (UTC)

It's still outside the scope of this article. This topic is about a specific point in production levels of petroleum. This petroleum may not even all be burned once extracted (plastic & lube). The topic you're suggesting would make a whole article by itself, and is an environmental issue rather than economic/geological. Divorcing a discussion of carbon released from burning fossil fuels and the consequences doesn't seem possible or constructive to me. NJGW (talk) 13:57, 20 June 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia has more articles about Global warming than Peak oil. Compare these two navigation templates:

• {{Global warming}}
• {{Peak oil}}

I.e., the scientific community has paid much more attention to global warming than to peak oil, thus far, and this shows up in the gross Google hit counts for each term:

• "global warming" - Results 1 - 10 of about 55,700,000 for "global warming"
• "peak oil" - Results 1 - 10 of about 4,700,000 for "peak oil".

Perhaps not coincidentally, Wikipedia's articles about global warming are generally farther along than the articles about peak oil. The odds are pretty good that if you think of something worthwhile to add about global warming, it's already in Wikipedia somewhere. Before suggesting that an article needs to include some peripheral topic, search to see what Wikipedia already says about the topic elsewhere. You may find Google to be a better way to search Wikipedia than Wikipedia's built-in search feature (I do):

• Search Wikipedia with Google for: climate effect petroleum combustion
  • For example, burning enough fossil fuel in a short enough time might trigger another anoxic event, which would result in a dieoff of many species, and could form the next round of petroleum for the next sentient lifeform to squander millions of years from now.

See Wikipedia:Building the web - if another article already describes the potential effects of burning "all" the Earth's petroleum by a certain date, then it might be worthwhile to link to it from somewhere in the Peak oil article, or perhaps from somewhere in the {{Peak oil}} navigation template. --Teratornis (talk) 17:21, 21 June 2008 (UTC)

For more information, check the backlinks from Anoxic event:

• Special:Whatlinkshere/Anoxic event
  • Effects of global warming links to Anoxic event

--Teratornis (talk) 20:57, 21 June 2008 (UTC)

A bit too centered on US lifestyle

I think that, while it is clear that a peak in global oil production would affect most of the world's population in some way, the article represents it still a bit too much from the point of view of the American Way Of Life (TM). While a rise in transportation cost may be, in fact, a huge problem for people living in suburbs which are only reachable by cars, one might consider the fact that only a extremely small part of the world's population has that living arrangement.

In north America, it may be an exciting idea to live in cities with "new walkable urbanism" in which most activities can be performed by going there by foot; in many places of Europe, this is still a living tradition and a single person can easily and comfortably live without need for a car. For example, I and my four siblings all have an university degree. Four of us never had a car, one of my brothers is using one recently because they have a little kid, but they could do without when necessary. Now, think of the huge part of the world's population who never will be able to afford to go to work by car. It would be quite amusing to them to hear that for north american citizens, it looks like the end of civilization if they can't continue that way. Especially if they know that, on average, every US citizen uses roughly sixty times more energy than the average citizen of the world.

Of course, for people elsewhere, there will be enormous difficulties to be solved, but they probably can. There will be shortage of cheap transport and agriculture may need to be adapted drastically. However, often it is not even clear that industrialized, export-oriented agriculture has helped to supply people with food; many times home-grown food consumption has been replaced by export production. This is, for example, one of the reasons, why in the Philippines now there is a shortage of cheap rice. (Joise) --82.113.121.16 (talk) 10:00, 25 June 2008 (UTC)

The United States has about 5% of the world's population and consumes about 25% of global petroleum extraction. I'm not sure where you get the "sixty times" figure, even if we consider all energy sources; the correct factor for petroleum is that the average U.S. citizen consumes roughly fives times the world per capita average (i.e., the mean; the median world per capita petroleum consumption is probably lower than the mean). As the world's largest petroleum consumer and importer, the U.S. will figure largely in any decline in petroleum extraction. This is already evident in the 2007–2008 world food price crisis, in which we see the linkage between price rises for energy and food. (Industrial agriculture converts fuel to food, while biofuels production converts food to fuel - therefore, fuel and food are to some degree substitute goods, so market forces are now determining how many poor people must go hungry to enable the wealthy to enjoy their energy-rich lifestyle.) Many other nations depend on the U.S. for its food exports, and/or as a place to sell their goods and raw materials, so any substantial disruption to the U.S. economy will reverberate around the globe. Political instability in the U.S. could be particularly dangerous, considering the size and potential lethality of the U.S. military.

How fast the U.S. reduces its petroleum consumption will determine how much of the petroleum "pie" is available to everybody else, especially to the world's poor who cannot outbid the rich for a dwindling supply of petroleum. The world's poorest billion people subsist on a per capita income of about $1/day; the next poorest 2 billion on about $3/day. People with such low incomes do not consume much petroleum, but much of what they do consume is indirectly in the form of inputs to modern agriculture. Petroleum made the green revolution possible, which multiplied farm yields and allowed the world population to explode to nearly 7 billion from its pre-petroleum size of less than 2 billion. Take away the petroleum faster than people can find substitute technologies, and agricultural output could collapse to pre-petroleum levels, along with the global population. The 1 to 3 poorest billion people who are first in line to starve therefore have a strong interest in how the U.S. and other large petroleum consumers handle their oil end-game.

Note that even though most European nations have more efficient economies than the U.S. (with the possible exception of Iceland, which burns much petroleum to fuel its cars and fishing boats, but plans to shift to a hydrogen economy "by 2050" - a projected date that should cause any doomer to laugh out loud), all modern economies have per capita consumptions of petroleum and total energy well above the world average. Even those charming walkable communities in Europe are probably using too much energy to survive a rapid and severe reduction in world oil extraction. We're seeing the first signs, with the protests by lorry drivers over high fuel prices, and that is just from world oil extraction having hit a plateau since around 2005. Since the start of the plateau, the world has added about 250,000,000 new people, and all of them have to be fed with petroleum, since non-petroleum-based agriculture probably cannot feed more than a small fraction of the people we have now.

In any case, Wikipedia should take a global perspective. Since the impacts of peak oil will be so extensive, we might eventually create separate articles to detail the impacts on individual countries or regions. One single article won't suffice, when virtually every nation will have to redesign its economy if it is going to survive. For example, every nation should adopt a One-child policy immediately. Incidentally, try to imagine the mess we'd be in now if China had not done the world a huge favor by adopting that policy in 1979. Peak oil might instead have occurred several years earlier, when we were even less prepared than we are now. --Teratornis (talk) 21:10, 26 June 2008 (UTC)

thermal depolymerization

I know I ought to be bold but I'm not famililar with the topic. Is the paragraph on the thermal depolymerization hype really valuable? I'd delete it because there's more serious stuff to discuss in this section and the article is long enough already. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.238.205.89 (talk) 17:42, 27 June 2008 (UTC)

It's well sourced and interesting (trash into oil... what are we waiting for!), and it's definitely an unconventional source. Do you have some links that show it to be hype? NJGW (talk) 17:53, 27 June 2008 (UTC)

I just remember reading about it when it was hyped several years ago. The claims made were ridiculous and it was hyped precisely because the idea sounds great. Don't get me wrong: recycling is great but this stuff can't compare to tar sands for instance. There's unconventional stuff that can make a difference and that deserves to be in the peak oil article and there's plain weird stuff that can't scale even if it works as advertised. If we're not talking millions of barrels a day (potentially at least), is it relevant to peak oil? I'm of course not disputing the thermal depol article, only its relevance in this article. Oh, and thanks for editing that link... I'll be careful not to let my proxy do that next time!

I tried asking at your talk page, but if you're using a proxy that might not work... Can you give us a link to the t11 spreadsheet you mentioned? As for the depolymerization, if there's some source that shows it's not scalable I agree it should go... NJGW (talk) 18:24, 27 June 2008 (UTC)

It worked. I answered at the place you referenced on my talkpage. I guess I need to learn proper wikimanners. :-) Where did you expect it?

As to the scalability of thermal depol, I think it's about as obvious as it gets and I'm not going to research the topic... which is why I posted here rather than deleting outright. It would be unorginal lack of reasearch on my part. ;-) Hopefully someone who's current on this stuff (assuming there's still something happening in thermal depol) will see this and do the right thing. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.238.205.89 (talk) 19:29, 27 June 2008 (UTC)

We have a separate thermal depolymerization article, which would be a good place to document the potential of the technology. Creating oil from trash is at best a niche market, because there isn't actually that much carbon-based trash compared to the oil we burn for energy, and because thermal depolymerization has a low oil yield for many types of trash (see the article). We notice trash more because it is persistent, rather than because the annual flux is high enough to significantly substitute for petroleum. This is not to say that niche technologies are unimportant; perhaps with enough niche technologies, they can start to add up to something. --Teratornis (talk) 23:38, 27 June 2008 (UTC)

So do you think that the paragraph should be removed from the peak oil article? I checked the thermal depol article by the way. It's about as dubious as the company... at first I didn't want to touch it but the potential amount of waste available for processing (disregarding other uses for the stuff) was overstated by about three orders of magnitude and I couldn't let that stand. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.238.205.89 (talk) 12:58, 28 June 2008 (UTC)

Graph

I think this graph:

must be either lower 48 only or onshore lower 48 only, because if you work it out, 1.5 billion bbl per year/365 is 4.1million bbl/day, but US oil production is about 7.61million bbl/day according to google. Does anyone know the details? I think the caption should reflect what the graph is actually showing. TastyCakes (talk) 15:06, 29 June 2008 (UTC)

Hmm this graph also:

Upon closer inspection, it seems the data from these graphs comes from EIA while the data google shows is from the CIA world factbook for 2005. I don't know what causes the discrepency... Possibly the CIA data includes NGLs, condensate and refinery gain? TastyCakes (talk) 15:24, 29 June 2008 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure the jump on the second graph between '79 and '85 is Alaskan oil. The first graph juxtaposed against Hubbert's prediction states at the image page that it is lower 48 only, which makes sense because Hubbert didn't count on Alaska when he made his prediction in 1956. NJGW (talk) 16:32, 29 June 2008 (UTC)

I did the second graph from EIA data. The jump in the 80's is indeed the Alaska North Slope oil coming on stream after the Alaska pipeline was started up. The disconcerting thing about it is that the second peak was lower than the first and didn't modify the overall curve that much. Currently the U.S. is producing about 5.1 million barrels per day of crude oil and 2.2 million bpd of natural gas liquids. The only way you would get 7.61 million bpd is by adding the two together, and finding some bonus fuel somewhere else, which isn't really legitimate. Most of the propane and butane produced from natural gas wells is sold as propane and butane, or plastics, not gasoline or diesel fuel. And natural gas has its very own Hubbert's curve which looks very much like the oil one. RockyMtnGuy (talk) 03:37, 30 June 2008 (UTC)

There's a lot oil/liquids confusion out there. It seems to be promoted by proeminent governments (and the media which cowers before them) actually. Maybe the article could do a better job of clearing that up. I found at least one instance of oil/liquids conflation in the article actually but I wasn't looking for it so there may be more waiting to be corrected... —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.238.240.15 (talk) 10:08, 30 June 2008 (UTC)

I think the last bit of discrepancy is from "refinery gain", although I won't pretend to have much idea what that involves. TastyCakes (talk) 14:41, 30 June 2008 (UTC)

There is indeed a lot of confusion surrounding the difference between "crude oil" and "liquids". Part of the problem is that the popular press doesn't understand the difference so you're never sure what they're talking about. Technical journals are clearer, but you have to read them carefully to be sure what they're talking about. Some governments, such as Russia, never clarify what they are and are not including in their official figures so nobody really knows. "Refinery gain" is the difference between what a refinery inputs and what it outputs. U.S. refineries actually produce 44.65 gallons of products for every 42 gallons of oil that they input. This isn't creative accounting, it results from the fact that the density of their products is less than that of crude oil so the volume increases. On a mass basis, their inputs and outputs would be the same. RockyMtnGuy (talk) 04:04, 2 July 2008 (UTC)

Demand Growth

I think it's worth pointing out, as the demand graph indicates, that demand increase in the US over the past decade and a half or so has rivaled that in China in absolute terms. people assume that it's all a matter of developing economies demanding more and more oil, but America's own increase in demand has contributed a comparable amount to tightening markets. I'd put a blurb in about this myself, but I don't have the actual numbers, and I don't want to just eyeball it off that graph... TastyCakes (talk) 17:48, 29 June 2008 (UTC)

The issue is that demand growth in China over that period is exponential, compared to a more linear trend in the US (where we may be dropping off starting this year). The point is that tells us what to expect in the future, which is more important. The US has done it's damage, but consumption rates now seem to be tapering off. NJGW (talk) 18:10, 29 June 2008 (UTC)

I agree part of the issue with China is that it is projected to grow much more in the coming years. But the fact remains that in the current supply crunch, demand growth in the US is as much at fault as in China (or almost). The fact that China is starting from such a low level of course means that even a great percentage jump in its consumption is smaller than a relatively small percentage jump in America's already high consumption. I think this simple fact is overlooked by a lot of people, and that it should be included in this article. People say "oh, Chinese and Indian demand increase over the past decade has driven up the price of oil", well yes it has, but America has done its part in the picture as well. Incidentally, I think stating categorically that any country's oil use is going to increase exponentially or taper out is unwise in the current market, and I certainly don't think it's established enough to be presented as fact in an encyclopedia article (unlike America's demand increase over the past few decades). TastyCakes (talk) 18:19, 29 June 2008 (UTC)

Agree with TastyCakes. This article should definitely mention that fact. Note the use of the phrase "in absolute terms". Zain Ebrahim (talk) 18:27, 29 June 2008 (UTC)

Actually I agree with you both. That is an important caveat to the whole 'China/India consumption growth' issue raised in the demand section. Can you find a source which makes the comparison for us? NJGW (talk) 19:06, 29 June 2008 (UTC)

It's silly for Americans to blame the Chinese and Indians for trying to do what Hollywood has been urging them to do for decades - drive cars like all the pretty people do routinely in Hollywood movies. The U.S. has lived in the dreamworld of cheap petroleum, and sold the dream to everybody else. This finger-pointing reminds me of a child who eats most of a bag of potato chips, and then blames another child for eating the last dregs. The U.S. is the world's largest importer and consumer of petroleum, and will be for a long time. The Chinese and Indian governments must eventually stop subsidizing fuel to the individual citizen, regardless of political fallout, because the rising price of oil would otherwise bankrupt them just as it must eventually bankrupt any nation that depends heavily on imports and fails to cut them. The world cannot consume more oil than it produces, so if world oil production falls, so must world oil consumption. It won't matter whether China's consumption has been growing exponentially up until then. China's consumption can affect the schedule of rising oil prices, but even if the U.S. was the only nation that consumed any oil, the U.S. could consume all the world's oil by itself - and might have gotten close by now, had the 7% annual growth in consumption (doubling time: 10 years) during the 1950s and 1960s not been interrupted by OPEC. At the United States' historic exponential growth rate in oil consumption, we could have doubled three more times since 1970, putting the U.S. alone around 80 million bbl/day of consumption by now. Which is about what the whole world currently consumes. --Teratornis (talk) 20:21, 30 June 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Soap. Although I guess a little leeway is to be expected in talk pages... I just want the page to point out the facts concerning oil supply and demand. The more opinion and speculation that can be removed from it the better. TastyCakes (talk) 21:49, 30 June 2008 (UTC)

Petroleum manufacture

Peak oil inherently depends on oil being an extractive process. If you could manufacture it, peak oil becomes irrelevant except as a curiosity. For NPOV reasons, it should be made clear that peak oil does not effect non-extractive petroleum and cover at least by reference some of the non-extractive ways people are exploring making oil. I tried to get a bit in along these lines but was quickly reverted. TMLutas (talk) 22:48, 29 June 2008 (UTC)

Moved from above:

Actually, I believe there are several Silicon Valley funded startups addressing the fuels situation. The Moore's law people are a diverse bunch and some seem to be paying attention. TMLutas (talk) 22:28, 29 June 2008 (UTC)

I deleted your addition to the lead because I don't see any discussion that this is happening/is going to happen. If you can provide some sources which state that enough is being/can be produced to make a difference that's different. NJGW (talk) 22:32, 29 June 2008 (UTC)

(undent) Manufacturing synthetic oil is not the trick... that's been done at least since WWII (though not in useful quantities). If you have reliable sources that show that the manufacture of oil could cause "peak oil [to] become irrelevant", or indeed even put the smallest of dents in the issue, then by all means lets discuss it. But to come in and say that you've heard of some start-ups so lets make changes to the definition in the lead of a GA is a bit premature. NJGW (talk) 23:02, 29 June 2008 (UTC)

You'd need a source of energy as well. If that source is going to be fossil fuel (and it would have to be for now and the foreseeable future), then you're still going to be stuck with a peak. Even tar sands are processed with fossil fuel energy... —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.238.240.15 (talk) 23:18, 29 June 2008 (UTC)

You asked for sources so try here or maybe here. So there are at least two companies that have pulled this off in the lab. This is not synthetic oil like CTL which is still extractive and will run out in the reasonable near future.

The second source is right out. There is no way of verifying anything written there, and so it violates wp:rs. The second source is a start, but there's no indication of scalability or a time frame. Also, it's only gasoline, so it fits in the mitigation section of the article, not the crude oil sections. NJGW (talk) 00:59, 30 June 2008 (UTC)

"There is no way of verifying anything written there" is such a confession of poor research skills. Did you try Google? virent biogasoline would have netted you a powerpoint from the midwestern governor's association energy summit last here. here's an html view. It took me less than a minute to find that link. A few seconds more yielded this which points out that there are at least two other companies on the same trail of using manufacturing techniques to generate petroleum out of simple sugars. TMLutas (talk) 02:59, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

Like I said, the first source is not usable in wikipedia. The two you give now are just pointing to startups, and don't indicate commercial success or scalability, and once again, do not create crude oil. You are bordering on being uncivil with your comments. I suggest we keep this discussion about the facts surrounding sources. NJGW (talk) 18:09, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

Why is commercial success or scalability part of the criteria for inclusion? Please do not make up your own standards. TMLutas (talk) 22:58, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

If it ain't scalable it ain't touching Peak oil. Pretty simple. NJGW (talk) 23:05, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

They're working on it, much like peak oil enthusiasts are still working on the date of the peak (and from the commentary on the petroleum page have been doing so longer than I had thought). Very often such technologies can and do scale so we should be mentioning them in the abstract as a way out of the more garish "end of the world as we know it" peak scenarios and do it early enough so that people who don't dig through the whole article aren't mislead. TMLutas (talk) 23:39, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

How about mentioning my pet mitigation in the lead as well? Surely the fact that nobody knows (it's not mere debate: the data is simply not there) the ultimate date of the peak means that any fantasy would do? No numbers required, right? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.238.240.15 (talk) 00:02, 2 July 2008 (UTC)

At synthetic fuel, the definition states "Synthetic fuel or synfuel is any liquid fuel obtained from coal, natural gas, or biomass. It can sometimes refer to fuels derived from other solids such as oil shale, tar sand, waste plastics, or from the fermentation of biomatter." If we're talking biofuel, we're past talking about Peak oil. Otherwise, with the other feed stocks mentioned, it's all still petroleum (or at least coal) related anyway. These issues (such as coal liquification) are discussed in the article already. NJGW (talk) 23:44, 29 June 2008 (UTC)

Since I *am* talking about biofuel petroleum using sunlight and simple sugars and it's currently in the "we can do this but we haven't ramped up yet" phase, it's at least as worthy of discussion as peak oil itself. TMLutas (talk) 00:47, 30 June 2008 (UTC)

Are you talking about biofuel or petroleum? They are two different things. See my comment about mitigation vs. crude above. Peak oil is about petroleum production, and mitigating the effects of peak oil is a topic that does deserve discussion. I definitely welcome more wp:rs links about this, especially ones that indicate success. This could be further expanded at the mitigation of peak oil article. NJGW (talk) 00:59, 30 June 2008 (UTC)

Do you read the links I've been supplying? The two are not mutually exclusive as one can tweak organisms to excrete petroleum. Petroleum can be described as a range of liquid hydrocarbons irrespective of how you get them. And let's be honest, nobody cares whether they come out of the ground or out of some cellular soup as LS9 is doing or using some solid state catalyst as Virent is doing. If they burn nicely using the current petroleum infrastructure and are chemically the same as the stuff we have been pulling out of the ground, it's petroleum. TMLutas (talk) 03:04, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

See my continuing concerns about your links above. Also, the two are muntually exclusive in re: to peak oil. This article is not called peak biofuel for a reason. Biofuel you put in your tank, crude oil used to be much cheaper than biofuel but had to be shipped and refined. Crude's applications have been much more widely researched and implemented, and that's why we have a petroleum economy, not a biogas economy. If you don't understand those issues, you are missing the big point surrounding this article. NJGW (talk) 18:14, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

I've no issue in researching and improving links. That's par for the course in the development of any article. I do have an issue in POV pushing and the I thought I'd try to drive toward a more balanced article before I started tagging it. 23:05, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

This article has passed GA review, so new links need to be at least of that caliber. Stating that an unproven technology will affect Peak oil is POV. I still haven't seen any sources that state that petroleum production is being researched. The sources you provide only mention biofuel, which is covered in the mitigation section. The whole mitigation section is about things that can affect the timing of Peak oil. Feel free to expand it with wp:rs links, as well as the Biofuel page and the Mitigation of peak oil page. NJGW (talk) 23:18, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

TMLutas, I reverted your edits because you were essentially vandalizing unrelated parts of the articles to make a point. Unless I missed something, there's nothing groundbreaking in the information you're presenting: people have been making synthetic crude, biofuels and such for a long time. There's a section of the article for that stuff as well as whole specific articles (mitigation, biofuels and such) linked from the peak article. There's a reason the article heading is the way it is despite the fact that we can convert other hydrocarbons (or carbohydrates) into oil or oil substitutes: in order to make peak oil a historical curiosity as you say, you'd need *a lot* of those hydrocarbons. You're talking about converting single sugars... well, where are those sugars going to come from? Please stop a moment and think about the amount of oil that are being extracted (about 73 million barrels a day). Every one of these barrels packs a whole lot of fossil energy. Maybe you're unfamiliar with the unit or this talk of millions and billions make you glaze over but I'm sure you can picture how much that is if you try. Now, unless and until there's a reasonably practical way to produce that much (or even a quarter as much) of the stuff, alternatives won't meaningfully impact peak oil. Right now, CTL and tar sands processing seem to have the most potential as alternatives and the date of the peak (2005 or now) already depends on whether one includes those in "oil". The thing is, both of these are subject to peaks unlike fuels made out of plants. The problem with plant-based oil substitutes is producing enough of them without expending too much energy in the process. Do the math! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.238.240.15 (talk) 09:17, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

From your revert "reverting all changes by TMLutas because it's easier that way". That's simply uncalled for. Subsequently you said "like I said I removed everything, justified on unjustified as the article is long enough as it is" when you reverted what Driftwoodzebulin put back in. These are not your only reversions. In fact, you seem to have 4 reverts of three editors in the past 24 hours. (timestamps: 18:19, 30 June 2008 08:48, 1 July 2008 10:51, 1 July 2008 and 14:15, 1 July 2008) You may wish to take a break. TMLutas (talk) 23:15, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

You're not paying attention. I did not revert: I just corrected a glaring factual error that Drift missed as well as some really poor phrasing. It's NGJW who reverted it because, as it turns out, your ref support you claim. I don't think that such a claim really needs to be supported but it was a wrongheaded edit to begin with so I'm not going to defend it. I reverted NGJW as well, in support on your position on extraction vs. production for instance. But when I revert NGJW, he follows up with a better edit that I don't need to revert. Why don't you try that? Alternatively, your could admit you're not knowledgeable enough about peak oil to edit this article without bringing it up in talk beforehand. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.238.240.15 (talk) 23:37, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

It's important to remember that this article, after having passed GA review, was edited and tweaked still further by many editors from a variety of POV's, all moving towards FA status (the main thing holding us back is someone with enough time to improve the way the links look, and sort out all "cn"'s and the criticism section). Any substantial changes especially to the lead need to be discussed here. This has been pointed out in previous threads. NJGW (talk) 23:24, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

For what that's worth I don't think this article is very good. It's a bit of a mess, it's too long, there's information in there that's going to get outdated quickly if it's not outdated already... and so on. I guess I'm a perfectionist. Still, the topic isn't easy to say the least not to mention controversial so it's not surprising there are much neater articles. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.238.240.15 (talk) 23:49, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

"Extractive petroleum"

Resolved

 – NJGW (talk) 23:20, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

Googleing ""extractive production" petroleum" returns links where a distinction between liquid (extraction) vs. solid (mining, ie coal) production is needed, as well as cases of "extrative, production". Total results are 167. As such it appears to be a neologism in regards to a fossil fuel vs. synthetic oil discussion, and therefore I don't think it belongs in the article (definitely not the lead). Besides that it just sounds like bad English. I really don't think this word belongs in the first sentence of the article. NJGW (talk) 23:44, 29 June 2008 (UTC)

I'm not quite sure how you got 167 results. For me "extractive petroleum" had 694 results, without quotes, 308,000. Since making petroleum was 100% an extractive enterprise until recently, I'm not surprised at the low numbers. I didn't quite catch your alternative construction how you want to present bug and catalyst created petroleum manufacture. Surely you're not just being a linguistic pedant in hopes of just keeping the info out or not prominently placed. TMLutas (talk) 01:19, 30 June 2008 (UTC)

Sorry, I guess you didn't know about Wikipedia:Avoid neologisms, which states "A new term doesn't belong in Wikipedia unless there are reliable sources specifically about the term — not just sources which mention it briefly or use it in passing." The reason for this is because the terms are not clearly defined. Did you find any usable sources that discuss the fossil/synthetic difference in terms of "extrative" vs. "manufactured". Also, keep in mind the discussion above about more petroleum vs. mitigation. We have to decide which one we're talking about here.

You're misusing the term neologism. Extractive is not a neologism nor is petroleum one. Extractive petroleum is simply a description of the ordinary process of pulling petroleum out of the ground as opposed to the brand spanking new "have petroleum crapped out by yeast cells" process that they've invented in the last year or two. It wasn't often used in the past because the extractive nature of petroleum drilling was assumed because, guess what, nobody had figured out any other way of acquiring the stuff so the adjective was not needed at the time. Now it is needed to differentiate between traditional petroleum extraction and the new techniques of petroleum creation/manufacture which may just relegate peak oil to the status of a historical curiosity. Again, where's your better alternative? TMLutas (talk) 03:12, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

This thread was already moot as the phrase has been rewritten. It does still indicate that peak oil is about extracted petroleum. Is there something else you are after now? NJGW (talk) 18:17, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

Nah, I just hadn't seen the rewrite prior to my most recent comment in this thread. Peace TMLutas (talk) 23:17, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

Also, as you can see I searched for "extrative production" petroleum because that's the phrase that is highlighted in the first sentence at the moment. The term highlighted is actually "extrative petroleum production" , which gets zero google hits besides this article. Also, the Wikipedia:Manual of Style does dictate the need for good sounding English. NJGW (talk) 01:44, 30 June 2008 (UTC)

My intent in siding with TMLutas on "extractive" was indeed to distinguish between liquid oil extraction which peak oil is about and stuff like tar sands which is outside the scope of peak oil. I thought it also made TMLutas point (two birds with one stone). Now, if it sounds bad, by all means delete it! Maybe someone will find a better (but still *terse*) way of stating this. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.238.240.15 (talk) 09:55, 30 June 2008 (UTC)

Oil no longer forming?

The article says:

It is widely assumed that the world's oil supply is essentially fixed because it is no longer being naturally produced. Several hundred million years ago, plankton and bacteria thrived in the oceans of the then carbon dioxide rich atmosphere. Also at that time, volcanic sulfur lined the ocean floor, preventing living creatures from inhabiting, and therefore consuming, the plankton and bacteria after their death. Those plankton and bacteria that settled in porous sandstone or limestone and those plankton and bacteria that were then capped by shale or salt were allowed to heat and become pressurized to form oil.

Is this accurate? My first guess would be that the same processes that formed the oil we use today millions of years ago are still in play, but that they act so slowly that for our purposes the amount of oil in the world is a fixed value. The paragraph above says the processes that formed the oil simply no longer exist, and fail to give a reference for this claim. TastyCakes (talk) 23:27, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

There are some who hold that reservoirs refill and that new oil is being created but they've hardly proven their case yet. The majority believe that oil formation is over for the most part. If we're going to get more oil, we're going to have to make it. TMLutas (talk) 23:41, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

I understand what the article says, I'd like to see a source for that information though. I am not saying "reservoirs refill", I'm saying that I find it more likely that environments exist in the world today that over millions of years will result in oil (specifically kerogen) generation. These environments include any anoxic environment that allows preservation of organic matter in sediments, such as shallow (but not too shallow) seas and ocean shelves. My petroleum geology class certainly led me to believe that oil creation is an ongoing process in the earth, although of course different eras have different sea levels and climates which change the amount and type of hydrocarbon created. While, according to my text book, the majority of our oil today came from the middle jurassic to the "Aptian-Turonian" eras (88.5 to 169 million years ago), more recent eras like the Oligocene-Miocene (as recent as 5.3 million years ago) also contribute a significant portion of our hydrocarbons, particularly the shallow ones. In fact the more I look through this text book the more convinced I am that this point in the article is incorrect. TastyCakes (talk) 01:25, 2 July 2008 (UTC)

The paragraph quoted in italics above is mostly incorrect. It is basically true that the worlds oil supply is essentially fixed, but that is because the world's oil reserves formed over a period of about 500 million years, from the Cambrian age to the present, and that's a long time compared to the few hundred years it will take to use it all up. The truth is that oil is still being formed in places like the Gulf of Mexico and the Black Sea, but not at any great rate. The rest of the text, "carbon dioxide rich atmosphere", "volcanic sulfur", "settled in porous sandstone", etc. is misinformation from someone other than a petroleum geologist. RockyMtnGuy (talk) 04:22, 2 July 2008 (UTC)

If I remember correctly, this formation process is explained in detail in http://www.abc.net.au/science/crude/ . I don't know how kosher this is in the geological community. Perhaps you can find out. (I'm not so interested in _your_ opinion of it, only what is verifiable in scientific papers) --Jaded-view (talk) 06:15, 2 July 2008 (UTC)

Resolved: This is no longer a good article

NJGW asserts above that this article has passed good article review. Unfortunately, we've got 13 citation needed tags live as of writing. That means it simply does not qualify as a good article. Any objections to delisting? TMLutas (talk) 23:47, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

Yes, my objection is that with all the time you've spent arguing these minute points you could have been trying to track down the sources in question or else removing what isn't factual. Are you trying to improve the article or derail it? NJGW (talk) 23:57, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

Also, having not {cn}'s is a requirement of FA's not GA's. From Wikipedia:Good article criteria:

A good article has the following attributes.

1. It is well written
2. It is factually accurate and verifiable
3. It is broad in its coverage
4. It is neutral
5. It is stable
6. It is illustrated, if possible, by images

-NJGW (talk) 00:09, 2 July 2008 (UTC)